Request Usage Optimisation

[Sheikx800]

Hi All,

I am currently trying to figure out a way that I can reduce my 'Total Consumed Quantity' of Resources that are being used by my project. The reason I am posting here, is that the area that I am really finding it difficult to locate information on how to break down DATAVERSE Resource usage. I can find my Flow/Automate Resource thanks to process mining and such, but I cant find a way of determining what activity is chewing up my Resource limit in Dataverse.

One thing I have observed via a trend on the Reports is that the act of performing Process Mining consumes BULK Resources. Happy for someone to confirm or deny that one for me but it does kind of make sense.... I just would have expected them not to hide the data mining functionality behind its own paywall given they are also shafting us for Resources when performing the action. 😑 Probably too much to ask for there. 

The Report that we can generate from Power Platform Admin Center -> Resources -> Capacity -> Download Reports -> Licensed User Requests tells us how much we are using and our quota which is... fine... But I need to know where to go to find out WHAT is using these resources. The only info provided is a Caller ID/Environment ID which all just points to my Dataverse instance. Its not telling my what specific action/table/entity/anything is eating the resources. 

If I go Power Platform Admin Center -> Analytics -> Dataverse, it tells me that I am using a lot of 'create' API calls, Entity Usage tells me a lot of 'msdyn_analysiscomponent' and 'searchattributesettings'. This doesn't mean a huge amount to me as its system-level entities and I dont know the relationships 'my stuff' has with 'system stuff' to increase those numbers. 

This is obviously only now becoming an issue because MS are starting to enforce Resource Quotas. I'll see some days that I have consumed thousands of Dataverse Requests without even touching the Environment. If we're going to be squeezed and billed for this stuff, I'd like to hear how everyone else is finding out specifics around what is consuming Resources so to manage business requirements accordingly. I haven't had any success with this yet so I am asking the question here. I expect this has become a full-time job for a lot of people recently.

Bonus question - How are Environments that have 'condensed' workflows dealing with these 24hour resource limits? I know it evens out the load for Microsoft... But I cant be the only one that has a large number of automations that trigger Quarterly/Annually for each client sending the Resource usage to the moon for that one day. Has everyone just had to re-design their Automations to distribute the executions? Is there a trick to that?

Thanks for anyone's time that has any answers!

Cheers 

[ivan_apps · Accepted solution]

I don't think you have to reduce the quantity of resources, since each resource can vary wildly in the amount of 'work' it does. 1 Power Automate flow can consume many more requests than another one depending on what it does.

Now are you getting a warning or email or something stating you are nearing capacity limits?  Does it tell you which capacity in particular it's hitting a service limit on? API calls or storage capacity? Its critical information to troubleshoot properly if you are getting close to a specific capacity or throttling. 

I don't believe you'll get Billed for overage, rather you will be stopped from consuming more resources when it comes to Dataverse storage. For Power Automate API limits you will get throttled for the day until your 24 hour clock resets. Note that there are specific limits for users vs. application users - you may have to buy service account licenses or capacity add-ons if you are hitting API limits consistently. That will increase your requests per day to satisfy the report generation that sends your capacity high. Take a look at this article for info: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/api-request-limits-allocations

To answer 'what' is consuming capacity per environment - I would recommend installing the Power Platform CoE - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/guidance/coe/starter-kit

The reports it generates can give you insight as to all the flows running in the tenant or a specific environment and I believe you can tell what's the most active flows & what environment is using the most storage capacity. You might be able to correlate that info with the reports that come out of the PPAC.

[Sheikx800]

Thanks for responding @ivan_apps 

As you say, some of my automations demand way more resources than others. Service accounts or "per-flow" licenses are definitely ways of addressing this and nothing that bothers me on a fundamental level. What's annoying me currently is that it seems difficult to identify WHICH Apps/Functions/Automations/etc.. are the ones using the Resources. I am grateful that you are throttled or paused and not billed extra when you hit these limits. 

Thank you for directing me to COE. I haven't heard of it before and somehow haven't seen it mentioned anywhere in the other documentation. Hopefully it provides some assistance. It just surprises me that there isnt some more direct means of achieving this given how critical it has been made to ensure peak efficiency. 

[ivan_apps]

I assume there isn't more of an effort to make this easily available because it will be a small percentage of tenants that ever will hit this limit. Microsoft recently upgraded the limits in 2021 such that a vast majority of the tenants will not hit any limits based on the usage they see. If you do happen to be in one of those tenants that does hit the limits, I'm sure you can hit up Microsoft support to provide you with a custom quote or solution that will keep you under the service limits or purchase the minimum necessary add-ons to help the service principal go under the API limits.