Plan your Microsoft Fabric capacity: Strategic guide overview

This four-part series provides Fabric capacity planning guidance for administrators and Center of Excellence (COE) leads. Learn how to allocate and manage Fabric capacity effectively, from initial adoption to enterprise-scale governance, ensuring your analytics solutions are scalable and well governed. You can also estimate your capacity needs with the Microsoft Fabric SKU estimator (preview). Enter details such as data size, workloads you plan to use, and other details. The tool will then suggest an approximate SKU and storage. This tool only gives an estimate, actual SKUs, and costs may vary by region, usage, and number of users.

Series objectives

By the end of the series, you understand how to:

• Plan and budget capacity for your first Fabric solution: Start with a small proof of concept (POC) on a trial capacity and scale it to production confidently.
• Scale Fabric capacities for self-service analytics across multiple teams: Balance cost efficiency and resource isolation when departments share or split capacities.
• Strategize capacities for centrally managed (enterprise) content: Support mission-critical data and AI workloads with the right capacity tiers and ensure stringent SLAs are met.
• Implement growth monitoring and governance: Use the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app and Microsoft Fabric Chargeback app for transparency, continuously optimize usage, and scale capacity proactively as adoption expands.

Series structure

The series is organized into four parts, each focusing on a specific scenario or phase of capacity planning:

• Plan your first deployment
  • First solution – POC to production: Learn how to begin with a limited-scope Fabric POC using free trial capacity, then gradually scale up through a pilot to a production deployment.
• Scale for self-service analytics
  • Decentralized content – consolidation and isolation: Focus on multiteam capacity strategies. Learn when to use dedicated or shared capacities, and how to maximize utilization while avoiding “noisy neighbor” issues in a self-service environment.
• Scale for enterprise and managed self-service solutions
  • Centrally owned content – tiered planning: Learn capacity planning for content managed by central IT/COE. Support critical enterprise Data and AI workloads with appropriate capacity (tier 1 or tier 2), and ensure performance SLAs and governance requirements are met.
• Manage capacity growth and governance
  • Ongoing management – monitoring and optimization: Get best practices for continuous capacity governance. Monitor usage (Fabric Metrics App), enforce governance (like surge protection, chargeback for fair usage), and optimize or scale capacity proactively as Fabric adoption grows.

Each part builds on the previous, guiding you from a successful pilot deployment to a well governed, scalable Fabric environment. By following this series, you get a comprehensive roadmap to plan, implement, and manage Microsoft Fabric capacities effectively as your organization's analytics needs evolve.

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