It is becoming increasingly important to understand how the Power BI reports/Semantic Model that are being used in your organization are performing.

When using Fabric Capacities this can potentially be of critical importance, because a single report that is not well designed could cripple or bring down your capacity.

By completing Power BI Performance load testing before it goes into a production environment allows for scalable, dependable, repeatable testing to take place in lower environments.

This will ensure that any current or potential issues are solved before the Power BI Report/Semantic Model goes into production.

Here is an example of Power BI Load Testing and what it looks like.

There are quite a few steps that need to be completed before the load testing can take place. In this blog post I will show you how to complete the initial setup.

In future blog posts I will complete the following:

• How to get the details for Power BI Performance load testing.
  • Deciding on what to load test.
    • How many pages.
    • How will users interact with the report page.
  • I will give an example of a report page with filters and slicers and bookmarks which are different from the default page.
  • Explain how to find the GUIDs for the Workspace, Report and Bookmarks.
  • How to extract the information for the filters and slicers.
• Updating the PBIReport.JSON file with the Power BI Performance load testing details.
  • Take information from the previous blog and put it into the JSON file.
  • Checking to ensure that the JSON file is valid.
  • Test to make sure it is working.
• Running a Power BI Performance load test using Visual Studio Code
  • Run the load test simulating users,
  • Give an example of what it looks like while it is running.
  • View the Capacity Units from the Metrics App to understand how much Capacity the report consumed.

What Is Performance Load Testing?

Performance load testing is the process of simulating user activity on a system to assess its behaviour under different levels of data and user loads. In the context of Power BI, load testing evaluates how reports, dashboards, and datasets perform under real-world conditions, such as multiple concurrent users, complex queries, or large datasets.

Why Is Load Testing Power BI Important?

• Scalability Assessment: Ensures Power BI setups can handle increased user activity without degradation.
• Resource Optimization: Identifies whether the allocated infrastructure resources (e.g., memory, CPU, storage) are sufficient.
• User Experience: Guarantees smooth navigation and interactivity for end-users even during peak usage.
• Avoiding Downtime: Detects potential performance issues that could lead to outages.

Initial pre-requisites setup

Below is the initial setup.

PowerShell Module

• This package requires an elevated PowerShell console to run. (i.e. “Run As Administrator”)
• This package contains an unsigned PowerShell script.
  • You must first use Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted command to allow running of unsigned scripts.
• This package requires the “MicrosoftPowerBIMgmt” Power BI PowerShell modules to be installed from here.
• You will need to install Visual Studio Code
  • NOTE: If you cannot install Visual Studio Code you can use the PowerShell ISE which is installed on Windows PCs
  • 

Power BI Requirements

You will need to know which report you want to test.

As well as in which workspace is the report in.

In my example I am going to be testing the following

1. Workspace Name: Fabric_FourMoo
2. Report Name: FM-Fabric Capacity Metrics Report

Ideally you are testing this within a Fabric Capacity, so the workspace should be assigned to a Fabric Capacity.

Visual Studio Code

I like to use Visual Studio Code; it is free to download and free to use.

Along with additional extensions it makes it useful not only for PowerShell scripts but also for notebooks or extensions such as Power BI Studio or Fabric Studio

You can download Visual Studio code here: Download Visual Studio Code – Mac, Linux, Windows

PowerShell Script setup for Load Testing

Next, we need to download the Source Code, which has got the PowerShell scripts which we will use in future blog posts.

You can download the source code from GitHub here: microsoft/PowerBI-Tools-For-Capacities: Repo for tools and utilities related to Power BI Capacities (Premium and Embedded)

To download the PowerShell script, you can do the following steps below, after clicking on the link.

1. Click on Code
2. Click on “Download ZIP”

Extracting the Zip File

Once the zip file is downloaded, you need to extract the Zip file.

NOTE: I would highly recommend that you extract the zip file into a folder with NO Spaces.

The reason for this is when working with PowerShell, it is a lot easier to use when folders do not have any spaces.

Here is where I extracted the zip file to on my personal PC.

Summary

In this blog post I have explained how and why we should be doing performance load testing.

I have also stepped you through how to install the pre-requisites, download and extract the software.

In the next blog post I will show you how to gather the information required for the performance load test. This is because it is not straightforward, especially when doing this for the first time.

Thanks for reading, any comments and suggestions are always welcome!