Microsoft Fabric’s Secret Weapon: The Metrics App That Spills the CU Tea

aferencz21
Aug 6
2 min read

What Even Is the Fabric Metrics App?

Imagine your Microsoft Fabric capacity is a gym. You’ve got treadmills (compute), weight benches (storage), and a bunch of sweaty data models doing burpees (operations). Now imagine you’re the gym manager, and you need to know if your gym is about to explode from overuse or if it’s just chilling with a protein shake.

The Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics App is your data gym’s Fitbit.

This app lets you monitor how your capacity is performing, how many Capacity Units (CUs) are being consumed, and whether you’re about to hit the dreaded “throttling” zone, also known as the moment your data says, “I’m too tired for this!”

Why You Should Care (Besides Avoiding a Data Heart Attack)

Avoid throttling: Know when your capacity is about to say “nope” to more work.
Plan scaling: Decide when to upgrade your capacity or turn on autoscale before your dashboards start wheezing.
Track usage: See which reports, users, or background jobs are hogging all the CUs like it’s Black Friday at Costco.

Access Requirements: Who Gets the Keys to the Gym?

To install and use the app, you must be a capacity admin. No admin rights? No metrics for you.

Also:

You’ll need a Pro license to avoid throttling during installation.
You’ll need your Capacity ID, which is found in the URL of the capacity settings page.
You’ll need to set your UTC offset, because even your time zone matters. Fabric is picky like that.

Here’s the official guide to installing it: 👉 Install the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics App

How to Read It, It's Not the Easiest!

The app is basically a Power BI report on steroids. Here’s what you’ll see:

🃏 Cards

SKU: Your capacity’s model type.
Average Utilization %: How hard your capacity has been working.
Peak Utilization %: The highest level of effort your capacity has hit, like its personal best in deadlifts.

🎀 Multi-metric Ribbon Chart

Hourly breakdown of:

CU: Capacity Units used.
Duration: Processing time.
Operations: Number of tasks.
Users: Who’s doing the heavy lifting, including service principals.

📈 Capacity Utilization & Throttling

Interactive vs. Background operations: Who’s using what.
Throttling thresholds: When your capacity starts rejecting jobs like a bouncer at a club.

🧮 Matrix Table

Sort by CU usage, duration, operations, and users. Basically, it’s the leaderboard of your data gym.

Here’s the full breakdown: 👉 Understand the Metrics App Compute Page