One of the most important responsibilities of a Power BI administrator is the management of Power BI Premium capacities. Power BI Premium is fully described in the following chapter but, from a Power BI service administration perspective, Power BI Premium can be thought of as an organization's dedicated hardware resources to support the use of the Power BI service. Not all of an organization's content needs to be hosted in premium capacity. However, these resources enable the distribution of content to read-only Power BI Free users and they provide more consistent performance, among other scalability and management benefits.

Office 365 global administrators and users assigned to the Power BI service administrator role automatically have the right to administer premium capacities in the Power BI admin portal. An administrator's role in relation to premium capacity is to ensure that the provisioned resources are utilized according to the organization's policies, and that sufficient resources are available to support the existing workload.

Power BI Premium administrators should be familiar with the following list of responsibilities:

• Create a new capacity with the available (purchased) v-cores:
  • An organization may choose to dedicate a premium capacity to a specific project or application
  • In other scenarios, one capacity could be dedicated self-service projects while another capacity could be used by corporate BI projects.
    • See Chapter 13 (Scaling with Premium and Analysis Services) for additional details on allocating premium capacity.
• Grant capacity assignment permissions to users or security groups of users:
  • This enables Power BI Pro users who are also administrators of app workspaces to assign their workspaces to premium capacity
  • This setting can also be disabled or enabled for the entire organization
• Assign workspaces to premium capacity, or remove a workspace from premium capacity, in the Power BI admin portal:
  • This is an alternative and complementary approach to capacity assignment permissions
  • Power BI service administrators can manage existing capacities and assign workspaces in bulk:
    • These bulk assignments can be by user, by security group of users, or for the entire organization
• Monitor the usage metrics of premium capacities to ensure sufficient resources are available:
  • The Power BI Admin portal includes utilization monitoring for each premium capacity
  • Additionally, activities involving premium capacities such as the migration of an app workspace to a premium capacity are included in the audit logs described earlier in this chapter
• Change the size on an existing capacity to a larger (scale up) or smaller (scale down) capacity node:
  • As more users and content utilize a specific capacity, it may be necessary to scale up or to allocate certain app workspaces to a different premium capacity or to shared (free) capacity
• Assign a user or group of users as capacity administrators for a capacity:
  •  This can be appropriate to support large, enterprise deployments with multiple capacities and many app workspaces

Given the importance of performance to any BI project, as well as the cost of Power BI Premium capacities, it's important for BI/IT teams to plan for an efficient, manageable allocation of premium capacity as described in the next chapter. This allocation plan and any project-specific decisions need to be communicated to the premium administrator(s) for implementation. The following sections describe the responsibilities identified here and related considerations in greater detail.