What is surge protection?

Surge protection helps protect capacities from excess usage by background workloads.

It acts as a resource governor, rejecting background operations when the capacity reaches a limit set by the capacity admin.

Why is it needed?

Microsoft Fabric operates on capacity units (CUs) shared by multiple workloads such as data refreshes, AI model training, notebooks, and user queries. Background tasks can be resource intensive. Without limits, a sudden increase in background jobs could consume all available compute.

Such controlling of capacity by background jobs would degrade performance for critical, interactive user operations, such as Power BI report querying, leading to slower response times and a poor user experience.

Surge Protection in Microsoft Fabric ensures capacity stability by detecting and controlling sudden spikes in resource demand across workloads, helping maintain performance for both background and interactive tasks. It ensures stable, reliable, and efficient operations across all workloads that share limited compute resources.

Benefits of surge protection?

1. Maintains Interactive Performance: Users expect fast, interactive experiences. Surge Protection helps prioritize interactive workloads by controlling and throttling background jobs during spikes, reducing delays and timeouts.

2. Prevents Resource Overload: It helps avoid capacity exhaustion by controlling sudden spikes in demand, thereby preventing failures, slowdowns, or throttling caused by excessive compute consumption.

3. Optimizes Resource Utilization: Surge protection balances compute resources between background jobs and interactive tasks to use capacity efficiently.
4. Enhances User Experience: Surge protection helps keep performance steady and smooth during busy times, so users don’t get frustrated or face delays.

5. Improves System Stability and Reliability: Surge protection levels out demand spikes, thus helps the environment operate more predictably reducing the risk of unexpected crashes, timeouts, or slowdowns.

6. Supports Scalability: Surge protection helps adjusting as usage grows, so Microsoft Fabric can handle more data and users smoothly. As a result, it enables Microsoft Fabric to scale intelligently.

Supported in SKUs

Microsoft Fabric Capacity (F SKU)

Power BI Premium (P SKU)

Power BI Embedded (A SKU), and

EM SKUs.

How to enable surge protection

Prerequisite: You need to be an admin on the capacity.

1. Open the Fabric Admin portal and select
2. Select a specific capacity.
3. Expand Surge Protection.

4. Select Enable surge protection.

5. Set a Background rejection threshold. *
   • When this threshold is reached, Surge Protection stops being active. The capacity then resumes accepting new background operations.

6. Set a Background recovery threshold. *
   • When this threshold is reached or exceeded, surge protection becomes active. The capacity rejects new background operations.
7. Select Apply

* The threshold applies to the 24-hour background percentage for the capacity. Capacity admins can see this setting in Capacity metrics app compute page under Throttling on the Background Throttling chart.

Please refer section “24-hour background percentage” below to know more about 24-hour background percentage.

How to monitor surge protection

Prerequisite: You need to be Capacity Admin on the capacity

1. Open the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app.
2. On the Compute page, select System events.
3. The system events table shows events
   • when surge protection became active. Capacity State will be “Overloaded”
   • when surge protection is stopped. Capacity State returns to “Active”

Monitoring per operation status messages for surge protection

1. In the Fabric capacity metrics app, when surge protection is active and background requests are rejected, the requests appear with status Rejectedor RejectedSurgeProtection
2. These status messages appear in the Fabric capacity metrics app timepoint page.

Please refer https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/enterprise/metrics-app-timepoint-page to know more about Timepoint Page.

How to monitor 24-hour background percentage

What is 24-hour background percentage for the capacity

The 24-hour background percentage is a performance metric that shows the amount of capacity resources consumed by background operations (like data refreshes and scheduled jobs) over the past 24 hours, as a percentage of total available capacity. Following non-interactive tasks are considered as background tasks –

• Dataset refreshes
• Dataflow processing
• Scheduled AI transformations
• Semantic model processing
• Report pre-caching

Prerequisite: You need to be an admin on the capacity.

1. Go to the Microsoft Fabric Admin Portal (or Power BI Admin portal if using Premium capacity).
2. Open your capacity under Capacity Settings.
3. Launch the Metrics App (or Fabric Metrics App).
4. Navigate to the “Capacity Metrics” dashboard.
5. Look for the visual/report called:
• “Background usage – % over 24h”
• This shows how much of the available compute has been used by background tasks in the last 24 hours.

Please refer https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/enterprise/metrics-app to know more about the Capacity Metrics App.

Role of the Administrator in Managing Surge Protection

Surge Protection is Microsoft’s built-in safeguard to prevent overuse of system resources, especially in shared capacities (e.g., free or Pro workspaces)

Fabric Capacity Administrator plays a very important role in anticipating, monitoring, and mitigating the effects of surge protection.

It is very critical for any organization using Microsoft Fabric to employ tool or mechanism that provides visibility into its capacity being used across all Fabric workloads — power BI, pipelines, dataflows, Lakehouses, notebooks etc.

To help organizations to manage Microsoft Fabric Capacity and to maintain cost discipline, Intellify Solutions Pvt. Ltd. has developed SMART Data Pipelines.

SMART Data Pipelines

Smart Data Pipelines optimize workloads and manage Microsoft Fabric capacity with intelligent pipelines that auto-scale based on demand.

Key Features are

• Automated workload scaling to match demand.
• Capacity management app for tighter spend control.
• Saves up to 20% on Microsoft Fabric licensing.

To know more, please get in touch at https://intellifysolutions.com/analytics-accelerators/#DMWRegistration