New tool for automating load testing of Power BI Embedded capacities now available

A tool for automating load testing of Power BI Embedded capacities was released recently. This tool can help you understand how much user load your capacity can handle when used. It uses PowerShell to create automated load tests against your capacities, and lets you choose which reports to test and how many concurrent users to simulate.

The tool will generate load on a capacity by continuously rendering each report with new filter values (to prevent unrealistically good performance due to report caching) until the token required for authenticating the tool against the service expires.

Using the new tool, capacity administrators can get a better understanding of how many users their capacity can handle in a given time frame. The tool can also be used by report authors that wish to understand the user load effect of performance improvements measured with Power BI Desktop Performance Analyzer

While the tool is running, users can both see the renders happening in real time on their browsers, as well as connect to the XMLA endpoints of the capacities being measured with SQL Server Profiler to see the queries execute as they come.

As the load test is executing, its effects will also be visible in the premium capacity metrics app’s Datasets page. Capacity admins can use this tool to generate load and see how that load shows up. Be sure to read the Premium Deployment whitepaper section about identifying overload in the metrics app beforehand. The scenarios analyzed in this whitepaper apply for Power BI Embedded capacities as well.

To see the effects of the load test in the metrics app after the test runs, admins should expand the “Datasets” tab of their metrics app landing page and initiate an on-demand refresh by clicking “refresh now”. Admins should expect up to a 15 minutes lag from the time the test starts generating load until the time that load is visible in the metrics.

To host the tool and other future tools and utilities,  we established a new GitHub repository. The entire repository is Open Source and users are welcomed to contribute, add additional tools and repositories related to Power BI Premium and Embedded capacities, and improve the existing ones.

Please be mindful of the existing load on your capacities and make sure not to run load tests during top usage times.
We look forward to hearing your feedback from using the tool and your contributions to the repository!