Easily scale up or scale down your Fabric Capacity using Power Automate (Via email)

Following on from my previous blog post (Stop and start your Fabric Capacity using Power Automate) I got a question from Tristan as shown below!

I always enjoy a good challenge and I got it working! In this blog post I will use the same method where I am sending an email to scale up or scale down my Fabric Capacity.

The good news is that this works if the Capacity is paused or running (It might take a bit more time when running).

Fabric Capacity Details

Before completing the Power Automate flow, I first needed to get the Fabric Capacity details which I will use in the flow steps.

I logged into the Azure Portal and went to my existing Fabric Capacity, and I then got the following details:

• Subscription
  • MVP
• Resource Group
  • MVPN-RG_Demo
• Resource Name which is also my Fabric Capacity Name
  • f2ause

This is what it looks like in the Azure Portal.

Granting Permissions to the Service Principal account

I wanted to use a Service Principal account for authentication, this makes it secure and also removes user access to the Fabric Resource.

To do this I did the following:

• I went to my Fabric Capacity Resource.
• I then clicked on Access control (IAM)
  • 
• I clicked on Add role assignment
  • 
• In the role assignment screen I then clicked on “Privileged administrator roles”
  • 
• Next, I selected Contributor and clicked Next.
  • 
• On the next screen, I made sure the following was selected
  • 
  • 1. User, group or service principal
  • 2. I then clicked on Select members.
• I then searched for my service principal and selected it
  • 
• I then clicked on Review + assign and assigned the service principal.
• I could then see my service principal in the Access control (IAM)
  • 

Creating the Flow

What I then did was to create the flow with the following steps as explained below.

• The first step I created was to look for an email sent to myself where in the Subject Line it contains “Scale Capacity:”
  • NOTE: Because I am extracting the values directly after the start of the subject “Scale Capacity:” make sure to keep it in the same format both for the flow and when sending the email.
  • 
• The next step is where I am searching for the subject to only extract the Capacity size
  • 
  • The code I am using is the following

    • trim(split(split(triggerBody()?['subject'],'Scale Capacity:')[1],' ')[0])

  • For example if I wanted to scale it to an F4, my subject in my email would be “Scale Capacity:F4”
• Next, I created some Variables as it is easier to define and populate the variables which can then be re-used in subsequent steps. As well as if I need to use this flow for another capacity, I can just update the variables.
  • I created the following variables below.
    • Capacity_Size
      • This is using the size I got from the previous step
      • 
    • VAR Fabric Capacity Name
      • This is my Fabric Capacity Name
      • 
    • TimeZone
      • This is my local time zone so that I can offset the UTC Time zone which is the default time zone for Power Automate.
      • 
    • I then added the additional variables below which are needed when scaling the fabric capacity up or down
      • NOTE: All the details are from the Fabric Capacity Details in the previous section.
      • 
• I am also using Azure Key Vault, to ensure that no sensitive details are stored in clear text.
  • 
• In the next step is where I am going to use the Azure API to scale the Fabric to the size I specified in the subject of my email.
  • 
  • 1. This is the URI which is required to connect to the right Azure resources.
    • In here I used my previous variables to pass through the valid details
      • SubscriptionName, ResourceGroupName and FabricCapacityName
  • 2. The Method I needed to use is PATCH
  • 3. The content-type must be set to JSON
  • 4. In the body is where I am specifying that it is an SKU and the name is the size of the SKU.
    • Which in my example is an F4
  • There are also the authentication details below, which in my example I used my Service Principal.
• I then put in a delay as it sometimes can take some time for the scaling to complete.
  • 
• Next I wanted to confirm what the status of my Fabric Capacity is.
  • To do this, I created the following step to check the status.
  • I searched for “Read a Resource”
    • 
  • As shown below I selected my Subscription from the dropdown menu.
  • I also selected the Resource Group from the dropdown menu.
  • I also selected the Resource Provider from the dropdown menu.
  • For the Shortcut Resource Id, I put in “capacities/” and then selected my variable called “FabricCapacityName” from above.
  • And finally, I put in the Client API Version which is “2023-11-01”
  • 
• The steps was to send an email out the status of the Capacity so that I can confirm the size.
  • Then in the send email step I put in the following details
  • 
  • Number 1 is where I am inserting the Status check from the Capacity with the code below.

    • body('Check_Fabric_Capacity_Status_Again')?['properties']?['state']

  • Number 2 is where I am getting the SKU Size

    • body('Check_Fabric_Capacity_Status_Again')?['sku']?['name']

  • Number 3 is where I am getting the status of the Capacity

    • body('Check_Fabric_Capacity_Status_Again')?['properties']

  • Number 4 is where I am then using my variable from earlier called “TimeZone” to offset the DateTime so that is current for my time zone, which is GMT + 10 (I like to live in the future!)

    • addHours(utcNow(), variables('TimeZone'))

  • Number 5 is where I am getting the SKU Size

    • body('Check_Fabric_Capacity_Status_Again')?['sku']?['name']

• I then saved my Flow.

Testing the Flow

The final steps are to test the flow to make sure that it will start or stop as expected when I send the email.

• The first email test is to scale up the capacity.
  • 
  • The flow then ran, and I got the following email back giving me the Capacity Status and size
    • 
  • I also then went into the Azure Portal to make sure that it had indeed scale to the specified size.
    • 

Summary

In this blog post, I have shown you how to scale your Fabric Capacity

I hope you found this blog post useful.

And if you have any questions or suggestions, peace in the comments below.

Here is the link to the flow I created if you wanted to use this in your organization.

FourMoo_FabricCapacity-ScaleUporDown.zip

Thanks for reading!