SPICE Purchased Capacity Fluctuations

Question & Answer
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1

Hello!

I was using SPICECapacityLimitInMB and SPICECapacityConsumedInMB CloudWatch metrics to get an idea of purchased vs used SPICE capacity over time.

Can someone please explain why there are so many fluctuations in the purchased SPICE capacity?

  1. We didn’t modify it that often.
  2. Why it goes down? I thought once you purchased it, it stays constant and it can only go up when you buy more?

Best regards,
Kseniya

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2

Hello @ksenstad , thanks for your question.

There are three ways of increasing SPICE capacity:

  1. As explained in the pricing page: “A 10 GB SPICE allocation is included with every QuickSight Author license”. So adding new authors increase the SPICE capacity.
  2. Purchase it manually in the QuickSight console.
  3. Turn on SPICE auto capacity purchasing.

In your chart, it looks that you are having continuous increases around 10GB, those can be related with new author licenses created in the QuickSight account. Does this makes sens for you?

Regarding the decrease of SPICE capacity, there is an option to manually release unused capacity from the QuickSight console, you can check the documentation here. With this method you can release at ance all the unused capacity in your account.

We hope this explanation worked for you. Let us know if this is resolved. And if it is, please help the community by marking this answer as a “Solution.”

3

Thanks @anadiezm for a quick response!

It’s now clear why the available SPICE capacity goes up - I wasn’t aware that it increases when new Author is added, in my head it could only be purchased either automatically or manually :slight_smile:

For releasing capacity, I’ve checked the documentation and went to the SPICE capacity management page and I didn’t see where exactly I couldn’t perform the “release” operation.

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Best regards,
Kseniya

4

@anadiezm another question is when the authour is deleted, then these 10GB will also go away? Because seems like then it would explain drop in the SPICE capacity, because last month 13 authour users were deleted, and then in April 3 were added, so difference is 10*10=100

5

Hello @ksenstad,

About the capacity release, in your case you cannot see it in the console since you are using almost all your capacity and this feature allows you to delete only extra unused capacity. Here is an example of how it would look like:

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And regarding the decreased capacity, if you reduced in 10 the number of authors during the last month that is the reason for the 100GB capacity drop.

Regards,
Ana

6

Got it, thanks @anadiezm !