PL-300 Manage and secure Power BI Practice Question
Your organization uses Power BI Premium capacity. You notice that reports are slow during peak hours. You need to identify which workspaces are consuming the most CPU resources on the capacity. What should you use?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Install and review the Power BI Premium Capacity Metrics app.
The Power BI Premium Capacity Metrics app is the correct tool because it is purpose-built to monitor Premium capacity health and provides per-workspace breakdowns of resource consumption, including CPU usage over time, so you can pinpoint which workspaces are driving load during peak hours. It surfaces metrics like CPU utilization, memory usage, query durations, and dataset refreshes at both the capacity and workspace level. In contrast, Power BI Desktop's Performance Analyzer (option A) only profiles a single report's visuals and queries on your local machine, not capacity-wide CPU consumption. Azure Monitor diagnostic logging (option C) can capture activity logs and metrics, but it requires manual setup and analysis and does not directly present workspace-level CPU rankings. The Capacity settings page in the admin portal (option D) only lets you configure capacity size, admins, and workload settings; it does not report which workspaces consume the most CPU.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Open the dataset in Power BI Desktop and view the performance analyzer.
Why it's wrong here
The Performance Analyzer in Power BI Desktop is a client-side diagnostic tool that measures the time spent by each visual, including DAX queries and rendering, within the report you are currently authoring. It does not observe server-side capacity consumption, per-workspace CPU usage, or background refresh activity on a Premium capacity. Therefore, it cannot reveal how a dataset or report is consuming Premium v-cores across the service.
- ✓
Install and review the Power BI Premium Capacity Metrics app.
Why this is correct
The Premium Capacity Metrics app is the dedicated monitoring solution for Power BI Premium, prebuilt with per-workspace metrics for CPU time, memory consumption, refresh durations, and query performance. Admins install it from AppSource or the admin portal, and it connects to the capacity's metadata to provide a breakdown of resource usage by workspace and operation. This directly addresses the need to detect which areas of the capacity are under heavy load.
- ✗
Enable diagnostic logging in Azure Monitor for the capacity.
Why it's wrong here
Diagnostic logging in Azure Monitor exports Power BI Service audit logs and activity events, such as dataset refreshes, report views, and exports, to a Log Analytics workspace for security and compliance analysis. It does not capture capacity-level performance telemetry like CPU utilization per workspace or memory pressure, which are only available in the Premium Capacity Metrics app. Additionally, a Premium capacity is not an Azure resource that exposes Azure Monitor metrics, so this path cannot diagnose capacity overuse.
- ✗
Check the 'Capacity settings' in the Power BI admin portal.
Why it's wrong here
The 'Capacity settings' page in the Power BI admin portal is a management interface for configuring capacity size, assigning workspaces, enabling workloads like paginated reports, and pausing capacity. It shows high-level status and settings, but it does not expose granular per-workspace CPU time, memory consumption, or refresh frequency metrics needed to pinpoint the source of heavy capacity usage. To see actual workload numbers, admins must use the Capacity Metrics app.
Go deeper
Related to this question
About these practice questions
This PL-300 question is part of Courseiva's 524-question bank — original exam-style content with full explanations and wrong-answer analysis, never real exam questions or exam dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This PL-300 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the PL-300 exam.