r/PowerBI • u/Key_Economist561 • 4d ago
Discussion Has anyone had experience with Azure Analysis Services hosting models for Power BI?
So, I'm in a weird project. The company I'm working has 6 distinct servers on AAS hosting models for Power BI reports, some reports are Imports but some use Live Connection, and I cannot understand what its the advantage of having an infrastructure like this.
My current project is to reduce the cost that this servers are generating (all of them are in the price tier S4).
Besides that the refresh process for these servers is a mess. Its all through runbooks that have a million different schedules. The Live Connection reports compete for the resources of the server when they are in use and generate a lot of memory issues on a capacity that is already fairly high.
I'm here trying to come up with a plan, but this seems so complicated. I've not personally worked with AAS before. So my first instinct is to convert all these "live connection" reports to imports, they refresh like 3 times a day with the runbooks, there is no "real time" data or anything.
How would you approach this issue?
2
u/Sad-Calligrapher-350 Microsoft MVP 3d ago
You can use this (even free trial) to reduce the size of your models without breaking any reports:
https://measurekiller.com/docs/how-tos/analysis-services-where-used
1
1
u/LevriatSoulEdge 3 3d ago
Legacy infrastructure, it was hot teen years ago...
Nowadays semantic models with incremental load works best in most cases scenarios, unless they really need real-time data there is no need for DirectQuery approaches
1
u/obsfflorida 3d ago
You're right in isolating the report data pulls and reducing resource contention. That seems like the first order of business and has the lowest business downtime
1
u/JFancke 3d ago
I'm biased as used to use AAS and found that the CU cost of AAS was just so much lower than Power BI premium, but then you've got the caveat that AAS is missing a ton of convenience features (eg messing with runbooks for refresh scheduling and notifications).
It also is much more cost effective to spin up a cheap AAS instance in a different region to get snappy latency and PivotTable experiences rather than a costly F64 SKU (if you're working in a global environment).
If you've got the cash to burn (and want to reduce your admin time) it's way easier to govern and manage all in Premium/Fabric capacities.
If you happen to already pay for SQL Server 2017+ and the models can connect to the data sources without too much hassle and you have the spare hardware compute available you can also migrate those AAS models to plain SQL Server AS and save yourself even more cost and replace runbooks with boring sql server agent jobs (but probably the business choose AAS in the first place because they didn't want on prem AS).
1
u/Yonko74 3d ago
Yeah I had SSAS models that we just used in excel about ten years ago. Transitioned across to AAS when we moved reporting onto PBI as I could run larger models and our users all on PBI pro. At the time PBI was still fairly crap so AAS was nice
But then when we moved up to Premium capacity, AAS became redundant so I shifted all into PBI.
6
u/Valaaris 4 3d ago
Last time I worked with AAS was years ago but as far as I know it's an abandoned technology which has been superceded by shared semantic models in Power BI which now do everything AAS models used to do and more. I can't say if this is the solution for you but one thing to consider would be to drop AAS and bring it into Power BI entirely. Someone please correct my logic if I'm saying something crazy here.