Buying and Pausing a Power BI A SKU

I want to set up Power BI Dedicated Capacity specifically for development and testing Premium features.

the Power BI Premium SKU’s should only be used in production. We want something that we can pause when not in use and help us to research all the Premium capabilities.

Thankfully we can go for the A SKU (1 through 6)

• A4 provides the same functionality as the P1 SKU
• A2 is the same as P2
• A6 is the same as the P3

The only difference is that you don’t get full user access like you do with Premium. Only users with Pro accounts can access the content (Which makes sense because we haven’t moved to Production)

And you can Pause when not it use. This is fantastic and will save lots of money in the development and testing phases

The question is, which SKU do we require. I know I need to test Paginated Reports and this is only available from A4 so clearly we need the SKU that corresponds with P1

Buying A4 SKU

Using an account that has at least capacity admin permissions in Power BI.

Log into Azure and Search for Power BI embedded

Here I have decided to choose our training subscription and training resource group.

 The capacity admin must be a member user or a service principal in your Azure AD tenant. I have selected myself for this role for this development Power BI area

At this point you need to choose the resource size and I know that we need the A4

If we left this one the whole time it would cost £4,467.41 for the month but obviously we only need this when we are testing Premium functionality so we would be pausing this most of the time.

Its extremely important that this is paused after use

I have added a few tags to this service before creating

Go to resource because we want to immediately Pause it

And Pause. I will only unpause the resource when I want to set up an App Workspace on this test capacity to check the Paginated report and other functionality.

The A4 SKU Will cost around £6 an hour so ensure you plan your development time effectively