Deep Dive into Microsoft Fabric Capacities: Fundamentals, Concepts, and Advanced Strategies

Microsoft Fabric capacities are powerful, flexible, and—at times—deeply intricate. In this advanced session, we’ll unpack the full lifecycle of capacity behavior, starting with the fundamentals: how bursting delivers peak performance beyond SKU limits, how smoothing spreads compute usage across timepoints, and how throttling protects shared resources under sustained load. Building on these core mechanisms, we explore advanced capacity operations including pausing and resuming workloads, scaling capacities up or down, and making effective use of reservations for predictable cost control. We’ll then shift to data‑driven optimization strategies, using real usage patterns to diagnose overloads, interpret smoothing debt, and identify when performance bottlenecks require tuning or scaling. You’ll learn how to leverage Fabric’s built‑in metrics, including insights from the Capacity Metrics App and platform telemetry, to develop a proactive, evidence‑driven monitoring approach. By the end of the session, you'll be equipped to operate Fabric capacities with confidence—balancing performance, governance, and cost in complex enterprise environments.