Performance analyzer is a topic which hardly finds its way in Power BI trainings in Sydney. The topic is rarely discussed in Power BI trainings in Melbourne too. This does not however mean that Performance analyzer is never used. Monitoring and analyzing the performance of a report becomes particularly important when the data model is larger and diverse. In such situations, Power BI’s performance analyzer feature acts as a savior.
What is Performance Analyzer?
Power BI provides you with a fully developed performance analyzer to monitor the performance of your reports. Performance analyzer enlists the complete details of time taken by each visual to complete the task assigned. It further helps you to make your report resource efficient by identifying the visuals that the most time to run.
Getting Started
Let’s have a look at the report page whose performance will be analyzed in this blog using Power BI’s performance analyzer.
This report visualizes the Product Line details of the dataset. We will use performance analyzer to monitor the performance of each individual visual and perform various operations to monitor the performance of visuals.
To get started:
- Click on the View Tab in the Ribbon Menu.
- Check the box on the left of Performance Analyzer.
Performance Analyzer pane opens between Filters and Visualizations Pane.
Start Recording
Start Recording button in the Performance analyzer pane triggers Power BI to start recording the activity. It is the initialization phase of performance analysis.
To start recording:
1.Close and reopen the file.
2.Click on the View Tab on the Ribbon Menu.
3.Select the check box on the left of the Performance Analyzer.
Performance Analyzer pane opens between the Filters and Visualization Pane.
4.Click on Start Recording.
Once you start recording the Start Recording button is greyed out and the Stop button becomes active.
5.Click on February 2016 from the Month Year Slicer.
The “log” in the Performance analyzer pane gets updated.
Understanding the Results
Any actions that you perform on the report after triggering the start recording button are logged in the performance pane. For dashboard optimization, it is important to understand the results of performance analyzer.
Each interaction on the report page generates a section in the performance analyzer pane which logs the time taken to perform the interaction.
For example, as soon as you clicked on February 2016 in the slicer, the slicer visual gets updated and a query is sent to the data model. As a result of this query execution, all the affected visuals get updated.
Each visual’s log information contains time taken to execute the following tasks:
If any DAX query is involved in the execution of the visual, then as soon as the visual action is triggered a DAX query is generated to the analysis server which responds back with the results.
This is the time taken by the visual to display the visualization. This also includes any image or geocoding locations that a visual need to fetch.
This includes the time that a visual waiting for other visuals to respond. It also includes the time taken by visual to perform preprocessing queries and other background processing jobs.
To find the execution time for each visual:
- Click on the Plus symbol on the left of visual in the Performance Analyzer pane.
Conclusion:
Microsoft Power BI’s performance recorder helps you to analyzes the performance of your report. Each and every visual is separately analyzed and its execution time is recorded. After the performance analyzer is allowed to start recording, every action performed on the report page is logged in the Performance analyzer pane. Each visual’s log information contains certain information such as DAX query, visual display, etc. Understanding the working and results of performance analyzer is important for complete optimization of the dashboard.
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