IncidentSEV3INC-2044

The executive dashboard takes 18 seconds

Leadership opens the executive page every Monday at 9:00 and waits 18 seconds. Find out why with evidence, fix it, and prove the improvement.

Reported by: Grace Hollis, CEO
Opened: Mon 4 May 2026, 09:12
Needed by: Before next Monday's leadership meeting
Priority: Medium
Time box: 5 h

Labels: executivemondayslow

Previously at Northwind

Since Sprint 02 the company sales model carries both the Sales and the ledger definitions. It now has 31 million order lines from 2023 onwards, and the executive page has gained a few visuals.

Why the business cares Eight executives wait for the page at the start of every leadership meeting, and some have started asking for Excel exports instead. A slow report is an abandoned report, and the capacity is busiest exactly then.

Brief

Grace HollisCEOemail Mon 4 May, 09:12

Dashboard

Elena, the dashboard took most of a minute to load this morning, again. We ended up looking at last week's PDF. Please sort it out before next Monday. Grace

Elena TorresBI Lead (your manager)chat Mon 4 May, 09:20

Grace's "most of a minute" is more like 18 seconds on my machine, but she's right that it's not acceptable. I captured Performance Analyzer and DAX Studio output this morning; it's all in the folder.

I want a before/after table with real measurements, not "it feels faster". And nothing on the page may change its numbers.

Sam PatelBI Developer (your teammate)chat Mon 4 May, 10:05

I added Customers Above Average and Store Sales YTD in March, they were urgent requests. Last Refreshed was always there. Maybe we just need a bigger capacity? F128 would sort it.

What you are expected to do

Establish a baseline: which visuals cost the most, and is each one formula-engine bound or storage-engine bound?
Find the root cause of each slow visual, with evidence from the files.
Rewrite or remodel so the page is fast without changing any number on it.
Measure again and produce a before/after table: Visual | Before | After | Improvement | Root cause.
Propose a performance budget for this page, and explain to Elena whether a bigger capacity is the answer.
Write two versions of the result: one for Grace, one for the engineers.

Deliverables

Baseline: per-visual timings and FE/SE split
Root cause per slow visual, with the evidence line that proves it
Optimised measures and model changes (DAX/TMDL)
Before/after table with improvement %
Regression check: every visual returns the same values as before
Executive note and engineering note (same facts, two audiences)

Evidence

performance_analyzer.json Performance Analyzer export of the executive page, cold cache, Monday 08:55.
server_timings.csv DAX Studio Server Timings for the four slowest visuals' queries.
vertipaq_columns.csv VertiPaq Analyzer: column sizes and cardinality.
measures.dax The measures on the page, as they are today.
model_notes.md
Reproduce it on your machine (optional)