Cost Optimisation¶
The Fabric capacity is the main cost of the platform. It is the compute and billing unit of all workspaces. Capacities live in a shared deployment so that several environments can use one capacity, which keeps the cost footprint lower. See Cost and reservations for the generic guidance of the platform.
Optional, set per platform
Auto-pause is an opt-in feature of the shared deployment. Whether it is on, and at which times, is a choice of your platform. Ask your platform team.
Pause a capacity outside working hours¶
When auto-pause is on:
- All capacities of that shared deployment are paused on a daily schedule (for example after 18:00 on weekdays). Workspaces on a paused capacity cannot run workloads.
- Resume is manual by default. Users in the operator groups can resume a capacity in the Azure portal or with the CLI within about one to two minutes. The platform team can also enable an automatic resume at a fixed time.
- Production is not affected when the production capacity belongs to a deployment where the feature is off.
Plan scheduled loads accordingly: a pipeline that is scheduled while the capacity is paused cannot run. Ask for an automatic resume time, or for a different pause time, if your team works at other hours.
What the platform team configures, and how it is monitored, is on Capacity auto-pause.
Choose the capacity size¶
The capacity SKU is configurable across the F-series (F2 to F2048) and is a standard change (Request and change).
Platform monitoring shows capacity unit consumption, throttling events and utilisation in the Fabric admin portal. The platform
team uses these to scale up in time when the load nears the capacity. Throttling that you notice in your workloads is a signal
to ask for a larger SKU. Low utilisation is a signal that a smaller one may be enough.
Other costs¶
| Item | Cost driver |
|---|---|
| Data lake storage account | Premium block blob, zone-redundant, one per environment, private endpoints |
| Managed Grafana (optional) | Instance size, optional private endpoint, Log Analytics ingestion |
| Historical log storage (optional) | Cool and archive storage of exported logs |
| Purview (optional) | The Purview account |
The Grafana runbook of the solution gives approximate monthly prices. Prices change, so check the Azure price list for your region.