Predictive Monitoring: The Smart Way to Manage your BI Costs

Drives Efficiency, Performance, and Reduce BI Costs with Predictive Monitoring

Modern BI and Analytics platforms, such as Power BI and Tableau, are indispensable solutions that organizations use to make informed decisions and take action. However, as organizations scale their analytics environments, the challenge isn’t only about avoiding costly disruptions; it’s about ensuring ongoing efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and robust performance at every stage. It’s about delivering a platform that is cost-efficient, scalable, and trusted by users, where performance issues and outages are the exception, not the rule. By proactively optimizing your BI environment, you not only control direct platform costs but also unlock cascading benefits, such as improved cloud database efficiency and empowered users who can rely on fast, uninterrupted access to insights.

Wiiisdom’s Predictive Monitoring is designed to help you achieve this. More than just a cost-saving tool, it’s a proactive solution that continuously monitors platform health, usage, and performance. By identifying potential issues before they escalate, such as slowdowns, outages, or inefficient resource use, Predictive Monitoring helps teams maintain optimal performance, prevent costly disruptions, and ensure their BI environment is always running at its best.

The Hidden Cost of Growth

BI & Analytics platforms are often sold as scalable solutions, but scaling comes at a price. Let’s take Power BI, for example. For small businesses using Power BI Pro or Premium per user, costs are predictable. However, larger organizations typically rely on capacity-based licensing, which introduces a new challenge: costs that double with each capacity upgrade.

When capacity is overloaded, the default solution is to scale up, moving from one tier to the next. This can quickly escalate monthly costs and lead to significant annual expenses. Beyond licensing, performance issues such as inefficient semantic models, slow reports, and excessive concurrent users can strain infrastructure, not only affecting budgets but also eroding trust and productivity.

With Tableau, it’s important to distinguish between Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud:

Tableau Server faces similar challenges to Power BI: your compute limit is set by your infrastructure, and scaling up means investing in more CPU and RAM. These deployments can suffer from performance issues caused by extract overload and excessive visualizations, often requiring additional machines and resources to maintain stability. Simply analyzing logs makes it difficult to pinpoint the root cause, thus delaying resolution and impacting user trust.
Tableau Cloud, while more flexible, imposes strict site capacity limits. If extract sizes exceed thresholds, organizations may need to purchase an Advanced Management license to scale up. The same applies to data refreshes, limited to 8 hours per Creator license or 10 concurrent jobs. If refreshes are slow or poorly optimized, purchasing an advanced license becomes necessary, adding to operational costs. Remember that Tableau Cloud is also a shared environment, so efficient behavior is essential to ensure resources are available for everyone.

Common Challenges in BI Platform Performance

As organizations scale their BI and analytics platforms, they often encounter a familiar set of challenges:

Unexpected Performance Spikes and Outages: Migrations, onboarding new users, or rolling out additional dashboards can lead to sudden increases in resources, putting strain on infrastructure and underlying database query costs.
Complex Log Analysis: When performance issues arise, teams may struggle to analyze logs and pinpoint the root cause, leading to delays in resolution.
Reactive Troubleshooting: Without proactive monitoring, it can take days to identify and address issues, resulting in prolonged downtime and frustrated users.
Capacity Planning Difficulties: Accurately forecasting resource requirements is challenging without predictive insights, increasing the risk of unanticipated outages. This can be especially difficult for organizations that put importance on maintaining uptime during peak periods.
Impact on User Trust and Adoption: Frequent slowdowns or outages can erode end-user trust and discourage teams from fully adopting the BI platform.
Operational Inefficiency: Time and resources spent on manual troubleshooting reduce the team’s ability to focus on strategic, value-added initiatives.

The Double Impact: BI Platform Costs & Cloud Database Query Costs

On a side note, managing BI costs isn’t just about licensing and infrastructure. Every dashboard, report, or user action triggers queries against your cloud database, and these can quickly become a significant cost center. Inefficient queries, poorly optimized semantic models, and high concurrency can double down on cloud database costs. Predictive Monitoring helps you identify not only BI inefficiencies but also the underlying database behaviors that drive up costs, allowing you to take targeted action before expenses spiral.

Predictive Monitoring: The Game Changer

This is where our new capability, Predictive Monitoring, is a game-changer for organizations to ensure they have a healthy platform and ultimately save costs. Predictive Monitoring transforms how organizations manage their BI platforms. By proactively tracking usage patterns, performance indicators, and content health, it ensures an efficient, high-performing, and trusted self-service analytics environment.

Key benefits include:

Identifying underperforming and costly dashboards and semantic models.
Flagging inefficient queries and refresh times.
Highlighting unused content.
Spotting noisy neighbors and bad behaviors, and equally identifying champions with good practices.
Predicting content behavior that could cause future slowdowns and outages.
Advanced log analysis with a list of actions ordered by the most impacted BI assets (the ones that drain your costs the most).

With these insights, organizations can clean up their environments, optimize performance, and delay or avoid costly upgrades. Predictive Monitoring also helps maintain platform stability, reducing the risk of outages and improving user satisfaction.

How can your ROI be improved with Predictive Monitoring?

The financial impact of implementing Predictive Monitoring into your BI & Analytics platform is significant. By avoiding unnecessary upgrades and outages, organizations could save tens of thousands per year.

Instead of reacting to performance issues, Predictive Monitoring enables strategic planning:

Know when (or if) to upscale.
Keep environments lean and efficient.
Improve user adoption and satisfaction.

One organization told us that they had a downtime of one hour because their platform wasn’t scaled properly, and one user was carrying out bad practices, causing the capacity to be overloaded and unavailability to end users. Rather than just painfully upgrade to the next capacity tier, this could be avoided with Predictive Monitoring by cleaning up obsolete content and launching targeting programs to improve data literacy.

Take Control of your BI & Analytics Platform

Predictive Monitoring is more than a technical enhancement; it’s a strategic asset. It empowers organizations to manage their BI platforms proactively, reduce costs, and deliver better experiences to their users.

If your platform feels slow or is reaching its capacity limits, it’s time to take a closer look. Get in touch today to see how Predictive Monitoring can be put in place for your Tableau or Power BI platform.