Tag Archives: Premium
Better Microsoft CRM with Azure Synapse Analytics & Power BI Premium Gen 2
Let’s be honest. The world we live in is driven by data. Presentation and efficiency matter. Using the right CRM with the best visuals and security will not only increase your revenue, but guarantee the satisfaction of your valued customers.
JourneyTEAM, a Microsoft Gold Partner, will help you get your organization ahead of this data-driven game. Microsoft announced updates with safer data storage, and smarter, faster analysis platforms. Introducing Azure Synapse Analytics and the Next Generation Power BI Premium! Below you’ll discover why you need not just one, but both in supporting your CRM.
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
Azure analytics and Power BI are an unparalleled combination. This duo is the optimum performance accelerator. You can reap the benefits of increased capabilities, and incredible cost-management. Using Azure and Power BI together allows you to extract maximum data and technology value for your organization. Just like it is important that your customers trust you, you need to use your data productively with Microsoft technology you trust. Read more to learn about each product. Then, see how they make the best team.
The Basics of Azure
Microsoft’s most popular cloud computing service is known as Azure. of:
- Databases
- Backups
- Virtual machines
- File storage
- Services for web and mobile apps
The Update: Azure Synapse
Azure Synapse Analytics is a modern, cloud based data warehouse. Now, you can build, deploy and run edge and hybrid computing apps. This developmental environment allows you to run these apps consistently across your IT ecosystem. It is also flexible regardless of the workload. Synapse Analytics offers benefits in performance, protection and price.
- Pristine Performance – Synapse is limitless. The service unites enterprise data warehousing and big data analytics seamlessly. You can easily learn, prep, manage, and serve data. Azure Synapse has an incredible capacity so that you can, on your own terms, query data. You have the option to use either provisioned or serverless resources.
- Protection – Azure’s analytics are services you can trust. Expect nothing less than sound protection when it comes to data governance, compliance, and security. You can find comfort in knowing your most valuable business data is protected by the most advanced security and privacy features in the market.
- Cost Management – If transformative insights are what youre looking for, Azure Synapse is what you need. With analytics that produce a significant 271-percent RO, it’s the price performance undisputed leader. This means it is 94 percent cheaper and up to 14 times faster.
The Basics of Power BI
Microsoft’s Power BI is an easy-to-use scalable platform. This business analytics service helps you gain more profound data insight. Data analyzing is an experience to enjoy. Get impressive visual data charts, dashboards, and reports. Personalize your reports with your brand and KPIs. Connect to, and create unforgettable presentations. Everyone in your organization will love .
The Update: Power BI Premium Gen 2
With new capacities, you can have access to all of the features of Power BI. Power BI Premium Gen 2 and its improved architecture provides you with these benefits:
- You get free distribution and even licensing for on-premise usage. Get Premium capabilities for Non-Premium owners.
- Analytics operations run up to 16X faster with enhanced performance – any capacity size and any time. The top speed operations will not slow down.
- Fewer memory restrictions means you don’t have to track refresh schedule spacing. Schedule refreshes and report interaction have complete separation.
- Autoscale automatically adds 1 v-core at a time for 24-hr time periods. When idle time is detected, the v-core is removed.
- New utilization analysis, budget planning, and metrics are reimagined. With built-in reporting you have clearly visible chargebacks and need to upgrade.
How They Work Together
Azure Synapse and Premium Gen 2 work in perfect harmony. The collaborative process is as follows: Synapse determines materialized views from collected query patterns. Then, Power BI creates the materialized views, and directs the queries. You are able to find solutions for reporting, advanced analytics, and real-time analytics with little effort exerted on your part. Let Azure Synapse and Premium Gen 2 help you business run even smoother.
Get Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI Premium Gen 2 with JourneyTEAM
JourneyTEAM will show you how to get the most out of these services along with your CRM. We’re a Microsoft Gold Partner with knowledge and experience with Microsoft products. Allow us to help you make this transition. Contact us today!
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JourneyTEAM was recently awarded and the Microsoft Eagle Crystal trophy as a top 5 partner for Dynamics 365 Business Central software implementations. Our team has a proven track record with successful Microsoft technology implementations and wants you to get the most out of your organization’s intranet system. Consolidating your communication, collaboration, and productivity platform with Microsoft will save time and money for your organization.!
Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636
JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more.
Large models in Power BI Premium public preview
With exponential growth in data volumes and complexity, the ability to easily extract actionable insights for intelligent decision-making is paramount to the success of large enterprises. Power BI customers demand analytical solutions that scale to petabytes, are secure, easy to manage, and accessible to all users across the largest organizations. This demand has driven Power BI to support self-service and IT-managed enterprise workloads on a single, all-inclusive platform.
We are excited to announce the public preview of large models in Power BI Premium. Power BI datasets can store data in a highly compressed, in-memory cache for blazing fast query performance. This enables fast user interactivity over large datasets. Until now, dataset caches in Power BI Premium have been limited to 10 GB after compression. Large models remove this limitation, so dataset cache sizes are limited only by the Power BI Premium capacity size. Use incremental refresh together with large models to unlock large datasets for interactive analysis with minimal management overhead.
The large models feature brings Power BI dataset cache sizes to parity with Azure Analysis Services model sizes. However, Power BI is the next generation of Analysis Services. Customers can take advantage of Power BI features such as incremental refresh, aggregations, and shared and certified datasets to take Power BI beyond Analysis Services in terms of simplified-management experience, scalability and discoverability. Large models is key to Power BI containing a superset of Analysis Services functionality, and follows in the same vein as the XMLA endpoints announcement for open-platform connectivity.
Please see https://aka.ms/LargeModels for further information such as availability by region, and how to set up your Power BI Premium capacity for large models.
Waiakea Overcame Major Manufacturing, Supply Chain and System Issues to Thrive as a Premium, Sustainable Water Brand
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Waiakea Overcame Major Manufacturing, Supply Chain and System Issues to Thrive as a Premium, Sustainable Water Brand
Posted by Kendall Fisher, Executive Producer and Host of The NetSuite Podcast
Waiakea is a premium water company founded in 2012 with the sole mission of protecting our earth through sustainable packaging, sustainable sourcing and sustainable logistics.
Under the leadership of CEO and co-founder, Ryan Emmons, the Waiakea team has remained dedicated to this mission, which sets the brand apart in the premium water industry. However, its focus on making the world a better place was getting slowed down by Waiakea’s business processes, which became outdated and cumbersome.
Both Emmons and Plant Manager, Jerry Clark, explain the company started off writing everything down on paper and taking hand-written logs. At the end of the month, the team would then reconcile production reports, resulting in time wasted as well as inconsistent numbers.
“It wasn’t that people didn’t want to buy the water,” Clark explains. “We actually had to slow ourselves down because we just weren’t reliable in our process. Every time something went wrong, we had to scramble to try and figure out what was going on.”
Emmons says Waiakea saw about 50% downtime in a day, bleeding money and barely staying afloat. And that’s precisely when he realized Waiakea needed to update its business processes and management system in order to survive.
Watch the video to find out why Waiakea ultimately chose Oracle NetSuite to manage its entire business—from manufacturing to the supply chain, demand planning to sourcing and accounting.
And to learn more about Waiakea’s growth story, click here.
by NetSuite filed under
Power BI Premium new capacity settings allow for more control over datasets
Five new Power BI Premium Capacity settings are available in the portal , preloaded with default values. Admin can review and override the defaults with their preference to better protect their capacity from running into issues and avoid problems before they arise. With the release of these new settings, Power BI admins now have the ability to set limits on “Max Offline Dataset Size” with the allowable range from 0.1 to 10 GB and/or set limits on queries to prevent noisy reports from impacting others using the capacity and create a more predictable and performant capacity.
As an admin, you can find these new settings on the Admin portal> Capacity settings page , expand the “Workload” chevron on the management tab of the capacity.
The table below lists out the detailed description of the settings and real- world scenario explaining the benefits of the settings.
| Setting Name | Description | Scenario |
| Max Offline Dataset Size (GB) | Maximum size of the offline dataset in memory. This is the compressed size on disk. Default value is set by SKU and the allowable range is from 0.1 – 10 GB | When users are experiencing slowness due to a large dataset taking up memory resources , admins would very often end up in the similar cycle of first identifying the culprit datasets, contacting the owner or migrating to a different capacity. With this new setting, admins can now configure the dataset size and prevent report creators from publishing a large dataset that could potentially take down the capacity and secondly save the admin from the painful cycle of identifying and mitigating. |
| Query Memory Limit (%) | Applies only to DAX measures and queries. Specified in % and limits how much memory can be used by temporary results during a query. | Some queries/calculations can result in intermediate results that use a lot of memory on the capacity. This can cause other queries to execute very slowly, cause eviction of other datasets from the capacity, and lead to out of memory errors for other users of the capacity. Without this setting, capacity administrators would find it challenging to identify which report/query is causing the problem, so that they could work with the report author to improve the performance. With this new setting, admins can better control impact of bad or expensive report on others using the capacity. |
| Query Timeout (seconds) | An integer that defines the timeout, in seconds, for queries. The default is 3600 seconds (or 60 minutes). Note that Power BI reports will already override this default with a much smaller timeout for each of its queries to the capacity. Typically, it is approximately 3 minutes. | When users are experiencing spinning on the report primarily due to another expensive report, admins would sometimes have to move the workspace to a different capacity. With the new settings, admins can better control expensive queries so that they have less impact on other users of the capacity. |
| Max Intermediate Row Set Count | The max number of intermediate rows returned by DirectQuery. Default value is set to 1000000 and allowable range is between 100000 and 2147483647 | When a query to a DirectQuery dataset results in a very large result from the source database, it can cause a spike in memory as well as a lot of expensive processing of data. This can lead to other users and reports running low on resources. This setting allows the capacity administrator to adjust how many rows can be fetched by an individual query to the data source in a dataset. |
| Max Result Row Set Count | Defines the maximum number of rows returned in a DAX query. Default value is set to -1(no limit) and allowable range is between 100000 and 2147483647 | Sometimes, a user can execute an expensive DAX query that returns a very large number of rows. This can cause a lot of resource usage and affect other users and reports executing on the capacity. This setting allows the capacity administrator to limit how many rows should be returned for any individual DAX query. |
Moving forward
Be sure to submit your ideas for new features and learn more about Power BI Premium and its capacities.
Power BI Premium – Know What Your Premium Capacity Can Handle
Power BI Premium capacities give enterprises access to their own dedicated resources in the cloud. With this access enterprises can distribute Power BI content as widely as they choose; it also lets them unlock greater scale, better performance and advanced capabilities that are not available to Power BI users on shared capacities. All of these are possible because you can choose how a Premium capacity’s resources get utilized.
Today we highlight a recently released tool that can help you understand how much user load your capacity can handle when used. During Microsoft Business Application Summit in Atlanta last June, we introduced a tool for automating load testing of a Premium capacity. A video run through of the tool is available here ( watch from the 31:00-minute mark)
The tool 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.
Announcing Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) Preview for Power BI Premium
Today, we are pleased to announce the preview of the latest addition in Power BI’s enterprise-grade feature set – Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) for Power BI Premium.
Power BI encrypts data at rest for all customers. With BYOK, organizations requiring additional controls over how their data is encrypted can exercise that control by configuring Power BI to use their own keys, stored in Azure Key Vaults, for data-at-rest encryption instead of Microsoft managed keys.
BYOK encryption applies to Power BI Premium capacities only, and organizations can choose to associate different capacities with different keys and\or different key vaults, as illustrated below:
Power BI will use customer-provided keys to encrypt the data of all datasets published to the workspaces assigned to the configured Premium Capacities. This means BYOK will not be applied for the following data:
- Data pulled into a dataset during run-time using DirectQuery (in composite datasets, only the non-DirectQuery tables will be encrypted at rest using BYOK)
- Datasets configured to source from SQL Server Analysis Services via Live Connect, because the dataset resides in a customer owned Analysis Services Server.
- Excel workbooks (unless data is first imported into Power BI Desktop)
- Paginated Reports’ data
- Dataflow Data
This feature, together with Power BI’s Multi Geo for Compliance, provides a suite of abilities that allow organizations to meet compliance and regulatory requirements, customized as necessary for specific locations, subsidiaries, or projects.
To turn on BYOK, Power BI tenant administrators should use a set of Power BI Management cmdlets added to the Power BI PowerShell module.
As any security and compliance feature, administrators should read through the BYOK documentation and follow recommended practices before turning on BYOK.
Announcing AI Premium Workload, Cognitive Services and Azure ML general availability
Today, we’re announcing general availability (GA) for cognitive services, Azure ML and the AI workload in Power BI Premium. The AI workload will now be enabled by default for all P-nodes, as well as nodes A3/EM3 and above, allowing the users of those capacities to use cognitive services in dataflows right away. A new workload setting is added to separately enable Automated ML, which remains in public preview.
How customers are using AI in Power BI
Since text and image analytics were added in public preview in March, Power BI users have been able to use it on their own business data. The feedback we received from many customers about these features helped us to make great improvements!
One example of how text analytics is used in Power BI is from Kinepolis. Kinepolis is a cinema group operating 53 complexes throughout Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Spain, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Poland, as well as 44 cinemas in Canada. The company uses Power BI AI capabilities to understand how they can improve their visitor experience by analyzing the sentiment of customer reviews and tweets.
“Kinepolis serves visitors in and from many countries, who vocalize their opinion through various channels. With text analytics in Power BI, we are able to structure and analyze all this feedback. It allows us to score the sentiment of our visitor reviews without investing in the data science behind it.” – Carlo Wambeke, technical lead BI at Kinepolis.
A new workload to support AI features
Power BI Premium allows you to dedicate capacity to the processes or projects that matter most, with the scale and performance you need. In addition to workloads for Paginated Reports and Dataflows, the dedicated workload for AI now gives the capacity admin more granular control over the capacity usage.
Capacity admins can set the maximum memory for the AI workload in the workload settings, under capacity setting in the admin portal. AI features need a minimum of 5GB. So, for example, the memory limit on an A3 capacity node needs to be at least 50%. You adjust the memory limit to prioritize other workloads in your premium capacity – and with the Premium Capacity Metrics app, capacity admins can track usage and performance of the AI workload.
The AI workload is used by cognitive services and Automated ML in Power BI. Automated ML can be enabled separately until it reaches general availability.
Ready-to-use text and image analytics
The GA of the AI workload makes it easier for users of a premium capacity to access cognitive services for text and image analytics. The first set of functions allows users to detect language of a text, score sentiment, extract key phrases, and identify topics depicted in images.
After the June release of the on-premises data gateway, cognitive services are now also supported with on-premises data sources.
Easy consumption of Azure ML models
With Azure ML integrated in Power Query Online, you can access all models created by you, or shared with you. Apply these models directly on your data in Power BI and repeat automatically on any new or updated rows during a data refresh.
Azure ML in Power BI is available to all users with Power BI Pro license.
Next steps
Power BI Premium Deployment and Management Whitepaper added!
A new whitepaper authored by Peter Myers presents a comprehensive body of knowledge covering all aspects of deploying, scaling, troubleshooting and managing a Power BI Premium deployment in an enterprise. The whitepaper provides both background information explaiing how various Power BI concepts play together in an enterprise deployment as well as practical examples of challenges encountered in enterprises when scaling Power BI Premium based solutions, and how tools available to Power BI Service Administrators and Capacity Administrators, like the Premium Capacity Metrics app, are used to indicate causes for symptoms witnessed and devise solutions to these challenges
The white paper is available in the Power BI Docs site here
Power BI Premium Capacity Metrics app makes navigating and viewing metrics at workspace level easier!
Thanks to all the great feedback we’ve received from our recent admin survey and from the Power BI Ideas feedback site. The Power BI Premium Capacity Metrics (version 1.10) app provides a comprehensive view of workload operations such as dataset and dataflow refreshes, dataset evictions, dataset queries, paginated report data retrieval/execution, and system metrics in the capacity for the past seven days. This all provides a more in-depth view into the health of a capacity.
Summary of the changes:
(A) Removed Filter page from the report and added the ability to filter by capacity Id and dates to each of the datasets, paginated reports and dataflows workload pages.
(B) Report displays the last refresh time (UTC)
(C) We are happy to support cross-highlight and aggregation at both the datasets and workspace level. The admin can now easily visual the cumulative resource consumption at the workspace level to make data driven decisions with migration or assignment of workspaces to a capacity.
(D) In the Query Waits tab (image below) , the query wait time distribution histograms is bucketed by query wait time split into hourly intervals reported in milliseconds as <= 50ms , 50-100ms , 100-200ms , 200-400ms 400ms-1sec , 1 sec-5 sec and > 5 seconds intervals. Long wait times could be a sign that a capacity running hot. It may also mean that the datasets themselves could benefit from optimizations and further investigation is needed.
Installing the app
Let’s get started by installing the service app. If you have a previous version of the app already installed, it’s best to delete it from your apps and then hit CTRL-F5 to refresh to avoid confusion with versions.
The app can be installed by searching for “Power BI Premium Capacity Metrics” in the Power BI apps or by clicking here to get it now.
Known issues during installation of the app
We are working on making improvements in the current service app installation experience. You may experience some delay during installation. We highly recommend you hit F5 on the app page and wait for the refresh of the report to complete before accessing the app. You can confirm the refresh status by checking the refresh history on the dataset settings.
After a couple of minutes since installation, if the screen appears blank as below, please hit F5 to refresh the page to get the dashboard, report and dataset links.
Additional steps to use the Premium Capacity Monitoring app with Power BI Embedded
This same app can be used to monitor any A SKU capacities you may have in Power BI Embedded. They will appear in the report provided you’re an admin of the capacity. Refresh of the report can fail unless you grant certain permissions to Power BI on your A SKUs. This can be done by opening your capacity in the Azure portal, clicking on Access control (IAM) and adding the “Power BI Premium” app to the Reader role. If you’re unable to find the app by name, you can also add it by its client Id: cb4dc29f-0bf4-402a-8b30-7511498ed654.
Moving forward
Now that you have the app installed, you can see metrics about all the capacities in your organization for which you are an admin. You can now make more informed decisions and more effectively manage the premium capacities, workspaces and datasets in your organization. These metrics are just the start. More detailed metrics and tooling will become available in the following weeks and months. And be sure to submit your ideas for more any suggestions.
Learn more about what Power BI premium is, monitoring premium capacities and how Power BI Premium works.
Check out “Managing Microsoft Power BI Premium capacities to your entire organization” YouTube session by Josh Caplan and Adam Saxton at Ignite 2018.
Premium Capacity Metrics app – query metrics histogram now available
We’re excited to announce the availability of two new query histogram distribution charts. One is bucketed by query durations(ms) and the other is by query wait times(ms). Query histogram distribution metrics along with existing comprehensive view of datasets refreshes, dataset evictions, dataset queries in general and system metrics, provide a more in-depth and complete picture of the capacity’s overall health. This app enabled Power BI admins and capacity admins to make informed, data driven decision in-order to make the best use of the capacity.
Query Metrics(new)
Query metrics are now split by Query Durations and Query Waits button on the top of the datasets page.
We have added two new charts to existing query metrics
|
Marker on the chart |
Description of Query Histogram Charts |
|
1. |
In the Query Duration tab, the query duration distribution histograms is bucketed by query durations reported in milliseconds into <= 30ms , 30-100ms , 100-300ms , 300ms-1sec , 1sec-3sec , 3sec-10sec , 10sec-30sec and > 30 seconds intervals |
|
2. |
In the Query Wait tab, the query wait time distribution histograms is bucketed by query wait time reported in milliseconds into <= 50ms , 50-100ms , 100-200ms , 200-400ms 400ms-1sec , 1 sec-5 sec and > 5 seconds intervals |
The Query Histograms can be helpful visuals, showing the percentage of queries running or waiting for a given interval. For instance, bigger buckets of over 5 seconds of query durations or bigger buckets of over 30 seconds of query wait times could be a sign that a capacity running hot. It may also mean that the datasets themselves could benefit from optimizations and further investigation is needed.
Installing the app
Let’s get started by installing the service app. If you have a previous version of the app already installed, it’s best to delete it from your apps and then hit refresh to avoid confusion with versions.
The app can be installed by searching for “Power BI Premium Capacity Metrics” in the Power BI apps or by clicking here to get it now.
Additional steps to use the Premium Capacity Monitoring app with Power BI Embedded
This same app can be used to monitor any A SKU capacities you may have in Power BI Embedded. They will appear in the report provided you’re an admin of the capacity and have granted certain permissions to Power BI on your A SKUs. This can be done by the admin of the A SKUs , by opening this capacity in the Azure portal, clicking on Access control (IAM) and adding the “Power BI Premium” app to the Reader role. If unable to find the app by name, you can also add it by its client Id: cb4dc29f-0bf4-402a-8b30-7511498ed654.
Moving forward
Now that you have the app installed, you can see metrics about all the capacities in your organization for which you are an admin. You can now make more informed decisions and more effectively manage the premium capacities, workspaces and datasets in your organization. These metrics are just the start. More detailed metrics and tooling will become available in the following weeks and months. And be sure to submit your ideas for more any suggestions.
Learn more about what Power BI premium is, managing premium capacities and how Power BI Premium works.
Check out "Managing Microsoft Power BI Premium capacities to your entire organization" YouTube session by Josh Caplan and Adam Saxton at Ignite 2018.