Understanding Fabric Capacity Spikes: What’s Really Causing Them
Last blog for the year! And before leading into 2026, let's talk about one of the hot topics that is always tricky to understand while working with Power BI and Fabric. On most days, your reports are running perfectly, and suddenly, you get a notification that you have consumed more than 80% of the capacity. A report that usually opens in seconds starts taking ages to open. Visuals take longer to load. Sometimes a refresh fails with a capacity-related error. When you check the metrics, there is a sharp spike in capacity usage that wasn’t there before. What makes this frustrating is that nothing obvious changed. No new reports were deployed. No large datasets were added. Yesterday worked fine, so today should work fine too. The natural response is to assume the capacity is too small. If usage spiked and things broke, it feels logical to conclude that more capacity would solve the problem. This conclusion makes sense. Capacity feels like a fixed limit, and hitting that l...