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High severitycapacity

Power BI Refresh Error:
CapacityLimitExceeded

What does this error mean?

A Fabric Activator rule stopped firing because the workspace's Fabric capacity has been overloaded for more than 24 hours. Throttling policies pause all Activator rule evaluations, background operations, and alert deliveries until capacity is restored.

Common causes

  • 1The Fabric capacity SKU is too small for the combined workload running in the workspace
  • 2Other workloads (Spark jobs, dataflows, pipelines) are consuming all Compute Units and the capacity is throttled
  • 3A sudden spike in event volume overwhelmed the capacity allocation for the tenant

How to fix it

  1. 1Contact your Fabric capacity administrator and ask them to review usage in the Capacity Metrics app
  2. 2The admin should identify which workloads are consuming the most CUs and either reduce them or upgrade the capacity SKU
  3. 3Once the capacity issue is resolved, manually reactivate any Activator rules that were paused — paused rules do not auto-resume

Beyond the docs

Common practitioner solutions not covered in the official documentation.

  1. 1Consider enabling Autoscale Billing for Spark workloads to offload CU consumption and protect alerting workloads from throttling

Official documentation: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/real-time-intelligence/data-activator/activator-troubleshooting

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