Surge Protection Stabilizes Power BI, Fabric Performance, With Limits

• Surge protection is a Power BI and Fabric feature that reduces the chance of unexpected performance bottlenecks.
• It requires experimentation, testing, and frequent monitoring to avoid creating new problems.
• The need for surge protection highlights ongoing architectural issues with Power BI and Fabric.
• It is not a replacement for routine capacity optimization and workload balancing that all customers must do.

(Update 17-Jun-25: Surge Protection reached general availability.)

Surge protection is an admin feature (in preview) for Power BI and Fabric that can help customers avoid performance throttling that occurs when too many background jobs are competing for compute resources. Throttling is applied automatically when a capacity uses 100% of its compute resources, impacting all processes and creating a traffic jam that takes manual effort to resolve. Surge protection allows admins to set compute thresholds that can help avoid throttling; however, it means customers never get full usage of the compute resources they purchased and using surge protection requires trial-and-error to find the right thresholds and avoid further impact to users.