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Notes on Bursting and Monitoring in Microsoft Fabric

Joey D’Antoni puts in a lot of work and then coasts for a few hours:

Bursting and smoothing is a concern for a lot of Fabric admins—it’s somewhat unpredictable in terms of how large the initial burst is, and how long the smoothing process takes. One problem that a number of both MVPs and customers have observed, is Fabric effectively being unavailable for things like dashboard refreshes for long periods of time. Microsoft describes this process in docs as the following:

“When a scale factor is over 1, it means that burstable capacity is being used to meet the demands of the workload. It also means that your workload is borrowing capacity units from a future time interval. This is a fundamental concept of Microsoft Fabric called smoothing.

Smoothing offers relief for customers who create sudden spikes during their peak times, while they have a lot of idle capacity that is unused. Smoothing simplifies capacity management by spreading the evaluation of compute to ensure that customer jobs run smoothly and efficiently.”

Read on to learn more about this process and how it can be tricky for administrators to manage.