🚀 Making the Move: What Power BI Customers Need to Know About Microsoft Fabric

Thanks to everyone who joined our first-ever AMA on the transition from Power BI Premium to Microsoft Fabric! It was a lively, honest, and highly practical session packed with insight.

If you missed it, this post recaps the key themes, new capabilities, and advice we shared - all based on real-world questions from your peers.

🔄 Power BI Premium is Changing — Here’s What That Means

Microsoft is retiring Power BI Premium (P SKUs) and transitioning customers to Microsoft Fabric (F SKUs). If your renewal is coming up, this isn’t just a licensing change - it's a platform shift. And it opens up an entirely new world of analytics capabilities.

What’s staying the same?

• You still get all your Power BI capabilities: dashboards, reports, models.

• Pro and Premium Per User licenses are currently unaffected.

What’s changing?

• Fabric adds much more: data engineering, real-time analytics, data science, and AI.

• Premium capacities (P SKUs) will expire and you’ll need to migrate to Fabric capacities.

If you’re currently using a Premium capacity, Microsoft has likely communicated your end date already. If not - now’s the time to check.

🧠 Planning Your Migration: Key Considerations

We talked a lot about what to think through before making the move:

• Assess your current estate: usage, model design, refresh performance.

• Understand how Fabric’s compute behaves: bursting, smoothing, throttling - all affect performance differently than Premium.

• Start early: Microsoft offers a grace period for early adopters, so you can move without double billing.

• Train your team: Fabric introduces Lakehouses, Pipelines, and a new admin model.

• Govern your rollout: Don’t open the floodgates without a clear plan - especially for self-service users.

🌟 What Fabric Unlocks for Your Data Strategy

One of the most exciting parts of Fabric is what it opens up beyond Power BI:

• Unified data storage with OneLake across all workloads

• Data engineering capabilities with Spark and notebooks

• Real-time analytics for streaming data

• Built-in AI and ML tooling you can apply directly to your datasets

• Integrated governance and cost control across services

🆕 What Fabric Unlocks for Power BI Users

This was the core theme of the session: “What’s new for me if I’m just using Power BI today?”

Brand-New Capabilities in Fabric for Power BI Users:

• 🚀 Direct Lake Mode – Combines the speed of import with the freshness of live data. No refreshes. No duplication.

• 🧠 Copilot & Gen BI – Use natural language to generate reports, write DAX, and ask questions. A faster way to get to insight.

• 🔗 Semantic Link – Let engineers and scientists reuse Power BI models directly in code — no more APIs or exports.

• 🧩 Model on Lakehouses/Warehouses – Build models natively on Fabric storage — skipping Power Query altogether.

• 🎯 Data Activator & Agents – Trigger actions, alerts, or workflows based on your semantic model. Automated, contextual decision-making.

• 📊 Richer Lineage & Deployment – Full lineage across data pipelines, models, and reports. Git-integrated deployment pipelines.

• 🧱 Unified Workspace – Analytics and engineering coexist. Reports, models, notebooks, and pipelines all in one place.

• 📈 Fabric Admin Insights – Deep monitoring of capacity, usage, and platform health — far beyond what Power BI alone offered.

🛠️ Our Recommended Migration Approach

We introduced a practical 4-step cycle:

1. Assess – Understand your current usage, performance, and architecture.

2. Plan – Prioritise workloads, identify blockers, and create a phased roadmap.

3. Execute – Migrate in waves, addressing technical and business dependencies.

4. Validate & Educate – Confirm everything’s working, and train users to get the most out of Fabric.

Pro tip: Don’t treat migration as a lift-and-shift. Fix what’s broken and optimise as you go.

🧰 Tools & Tips We Shared

• Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring (FUAM): Free tool to monitor capacity and usage.

• Custom tooling (like our Spect8 app): Track usage beyond 30 days, stitch together Power BI and Fabric insights.

• Govern carefully: If you're not ready for citizen data engineering, you can switch off Fabric creation at the tenant level (but don't leave it off forever).

🆓How Our Free Assessment Can Help

As mentioned during the AMA, we're offering a no-cost migration assessment (for eligible customers via Azure Innovate funding).

It includes:

• A Data Landscape Workshop to understand your broader analytics needs

• A Power BI capacity review to find inefficiencies and performance blockers

• Model benchmarking against best practices

• A migration plan tailored to your environment

• Access to our Fabric Fundamentals course to upskill your team

If you're looking to move with confidence, or even just understand where you stand, this is a great place to start.

✅ Takeaways

• Don't panic - this isn't a scary migration if planned properly.

• Start early to avoid disruption and access Fabric's broader potential.

• Think beyond lift-and-shift - Fabric gives you the chance to fix and evolve.

• Power BI gets better in Fabric - not replaced, but supercharged.

Got more questions? Reach out to the team, check out the recording for a deeper dive, or download the flyer of our assessment.

Thanks again to everyone who joined us! Keep an eye out for the next AMA!