Introduction to Administering Microsoft Fabric

The Fabric Admin’s Role: Steering the Ship

Administering Microsoft Fabric encompasses a diverse array of tasks crucial for ensuring the platform’s efficient and effective utilization within an organization. As a Fabric administrator (admin), you play a pivotal role in overseeing various aspects of the platform.

This demands a comprehensive understanding of:

Fabric Architecture: Grasping the underlying structure and components of Fabric to make informed decisions about deployment and configuration.
Security and Governance: Implementing robust security measures and data governance policies to protect sensitive information and ensure compliance.
Analytics Capabilities: Understanding Fabric’s analytics tools and features to empower users to derive insights from their data.
Deployment and Licensing Options: Navigating the available deployment and licensing choices to align with your organization’s specific needs and budget.
Administrative Tools: Mastering the Fabric admin portal and other tools to effectively configure and manage the Fabric environment.

Collaboration and Alignment

Fabric admins collaborate closely with diverse stakeholders, including business users, data analysts, and other IT professionals. This collaboration ensures that Fabric is deployed and utilized in a manner that not only fulfills business objectives but also adheres to organizational policies and standards.

A Unified Analytics Solution

Microsoft Fabric presents an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises, encompassing everything from data movement to data science, real-time intelligence, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive suite of workloads:

Data warehousing
Data engineering
Data integration
Data science
Real-time intelligence
Business intelligence

The SaaS Foundation

The platform’s foundation is built on Software as a Service (SaaS), ensuring a simplified and integrated approach. The following image illustrates the Fabric architecture, with OneLake serving as the bedrock and each experience built on top.

OneLake: The Centralized Data Lake

All Fabric experiences seamlessly utilize OneLake as their native store without requiring additional configuration. OneLake employs a hierarchical structure to streamline management across your organization. There’s a single OneLake instance per tenant, providing a unified file-system namespace that spans users, regions, and even clouds. The data within OneLake is organized into manageable containers for easy handling.

Key Fabric Concepts: Tenant, Capacity, Domain, Workspace, and Item

Tenant: A dedicated space for organizations to create, store, and manage Fabric items. It often exists as a single instance for an organization and aligns with Microsoft Entra ID. The Fabric tenant maps to the root of OneLake, occupying the top level of the hierarchy.
Capacity: A dedicated set of resources available at a given time for utilization. A tenant can have multiple capacities associated with it. Capacity defines a resource’s ability to perform activities or produce output. Different items consume varying amounts of capacity at different times. Fabric offers capacity through its SKU and Trials.
Domain: A logical grouping of workspaces, used to organize items in a way that makes sense for your organization. You can group elements to simplify access for the right people to the relevant workspaces. For instance, you might have domains for sales, marketing, and finance.
Workspace: A collection of items that brings together different functionalities within a tenant. It acts as a container that leverages capacity for executed work and provides access control for the items within it. For example, in a sales workspace, users associated with the sales organization can create data warehouses, run notebooks, create semantic models, generate reports, and more.
Items: The fundamental building blocks of the Fabric platform, representing the objects you create and manage within Fabric. Items encompass data warehouses, data pipelines, semantic models, reports, and dashboards.

Understanding Fabric Concepts: Key for Admins

Understanding these Fabric concepts is crucial for administrators as it facilitates effective management of the Fabric environment.

Note: To learn how to opt in to the Fabric public preview, refer to “Enable Microsoft Fabric for your organization.”
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/admin/fabric-switch

Understand the Fabric Administrator Role

Beyond the Architecture: The Admin’s Perspective

Now that you grasp Fabric’s architecture and the potential activities your colleagues might undertake with the product, let’s delve into the administrator role and the tools at your disposal for managing the platform.

Multiple Roles, Shared Responsibility

Administering Microsoft Fabric within your organization involves collaboration among several roles. If you’re a Microsoft 365 admin, a Power Platform admin, or a Fabric capacity admin, you play a part in Fabric administration. The Power BI admin role is evolving into the Fabric admin role, further highlighting the interconnectedness of these responsibilities.

Note: For detailed information on the specific admin roles and their responsibilities, refer to the Microsoft documentation on “What is Microsoft Fabric administration?”
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/admin/microsoft-fabric-admin

The Fabric Admin’s Workspace

As a Fabric admin, your primary workspace is the Fabric admin portal. However, you might also need to familiarize yourself with other tools:

The Microsoft 365 admin center
The Microsoft 365 Security & Microsoft Purview compliance portal
Microsoft Entra ID in the Azure portal
PowerShell cmdlets
Administrative APIs and SDKs

Admin Tasks: A Diverse Landscape

As an admin, your responsibilities span a wide spectrum to ensure the smooth operation of the Fabric platform. These tasks encompass:

Security and Access Control: This critical aspect involves managing security and access control to safeguard sensitive data. You can leverage role-based access control (RBAC) to define user permissions, set up data gateways for secure on-premises data source connections, and utilize Microsoft Entra ID for user access management.
Data Governance: Effective Fabric administration necessitates a solid grasp of data governance principles. You’ll need to understand how to secure inbound and outbound connectivity within your tenant, monitor usage and performance metrics, and apply data governance policies to control data access.
Customization and Configuration: Tailoring the platform to your organization’s needs is another key responsibility. This might include configuring private links for tenant security, defining data classification policies, and adjusting the visual appearance of reports and dashboards.
Monitoring and Optimization: As an admin, you need to monitor the platform’s performance and usage, optimize resources, and troubleshoot issues. This involves configuring monitoring and alerting settings, optimizing query performance, managing capacity and scaling, and addressing data refresh and connectivity problems.

The specific tasks you undertake may vary based on your organization’s requirements and the complexity of your Fabric implementation.

Admin Tools: Your Arsenal

To effectively execute the tasks mentioned above, you’ll need to become familiar with a few essential tools:

Fabric Admin Portal: This web-based portal serves as your central hub for managing all aspects of the platform. It allows you to manage settings centrally, review configurations, and apply changes across the entire tenant or specific capacities. You can also manage users, admins, groups, access audit logs, and monitor usage and performance.Important: The Power BI admin portal has been expanded into the Fabric admin portal. Refer to the Microsoft documentation for further information.The admin portal features a crucial Fabric on/off switch in tenant settings, enabling organizations using Power BI to opt into Fabric. Here, you can either enable Fabric for your entire tenant or delegate this control to capacity admins.
PowerShell Cmdlets: Fabric provides a set of PowerShell cmdlets for automating common administrative tasks. These simple commands streamline operations like group creation and management, data source and gateway configuration, and usage and performance monitoring. You can even use cmdlets to manage the Fabric admin APIs and SDKs.Note: Refer to the Microsoft documentation for additional resources on PowerShell cmdlets compatible with Fabric.
Admin APIs and SDKs: These tools enable developers to programmatically interact with the software system. An API (Application Programming Interface) defines protocols and tools for communication between different software applications. An SDK (Software Development Kit) provides tools and libraries to help developers create applications that interact with a specific system or platform. You can use APIs and SDKs to automate administrative tasks and integrate Fabric with other systems.You can make API requests using any HTTP client library that supports OAuth 2.0 authentication, like Postman, or automate the process with PowerShell scripts.
Admin Monitoring Workspace: Fabric tenant admins have access to the new admin monitoring workspace. You can share access to this workspace or specific items within it with other users in your organization. It includes the Feature Usage and Adoption semantic model and report, offering insights into your Fabric environment’s usage and performance. This information aids in identifying trends, patterns, and troubleshooting issues.

By mastering these administrative tools, you’ll be well-equipped to manage your Fabric environment effectively and ensure its optimal performance for your organization.

The Fabric on/off switch, located in tenant settings let’s organizations that use Power BI opt into Fabric. Here, you can enable Fabric for your tenant or allow capacity admins to enable Fabric.

Admin monitoring workspace

Manage Fabric Security

Microsoft Fabric security builds upon the foundation of Power BI security. As an admin, your role extends to managing security for the entire Fabric environment. This includes handling users and groups, as well as controlling how users interact with Fabric in terms of content sharing and distribution.

Manage Users: Assigning and Managing Licenses

Licenses play a pivotal role in determining the level of access and functionality that users have within Fabric. Administrators ensure that licensed users have the necessary access to data and analytics to fulfill their roles effectively. Simultaneously, they limit access to sensitive data and uphold compliance with data protection laws and regulations.

License management empowers administrators to monitor and control costs by ensuring efficient license allocation, granting access only to users who genuinely require it. This practice prevents unnecessary expenses and optimizes resource utilization within the organization.

In essence, having well-defined procedures for assigning and managing licenses helps control access to data and analytics, ensures regulatory compliance, and optimizes costs.

License Management Location:

License management for Fabric takes place within the Microsoft 365 admin center. For in-depth information, consult the Microsoft documentation on “Assign licenses to users.”
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/manage/assign-licenses-to-users?view=o365-worldwide

Manage Items and Sharing

As an admin, you oversee how users interact with Fabric in terms of content sharing and distribution. This encompasses managing how users share content with others, both internally and externally, adhering to your organization’s policies and procedures. Additionally, you manage how users interact with various items within Fabric, such as data warehouses, data pipelines, semantic models, reports, and dashboards.

Best Practices for Item Distribution:

The most effective way to distribute items within workspaces is through a workspace app or directly through the workspace itself. Granting the least permissive rights necessary is a fundamental step in safeguarding your data. You can share read-only apps for report access or provide access to workspaces for collaborative development. Enforcing these best practices is crucial for managing and distributing items securely.

By understanding and implementing these security and access control measures, you can establish a robust and compliant Fabric environment that empowers your organization to leverage data insights while protecting sensitive information.

Built-in Governance Features

Fabric incorporates several built-in governance features to assist you in managing and controlling your data. Endorsement empowers you, as an admin, to designate specific Fabric items as trusted and approved for use across the organization.

Admins can also leverage the scanner API to scan Fabric items for sensitive data and the data lineage feature to track the flow of data through Fabric.

Endorse Fabric Content

Content endorsement is a vital governance feature that fosters trust in your data assets by promoting and certifying specific Fabric items as reliable and approved for organizational use. All Fabric items, except dashboards, can be endorsed.

Endorsed assets are easily recognizable by a badge indicating their reviewed and approved status. Endorsement helps users identify trustworthy assets for accurate information, and it also aids admins in managing the overall growth of items within the environment.

Promoted Fabric content displays a “Promoted” badge in the Fabric portal. Workspace members with contributor or admin roles can promote content within a workspace, while Fabric admins can promote content across the entire organization.
Certified content undergoes a more formal review process by a designated reviewer. Certified Fabric content is marked with a “Certified” badge in the Fabric portal. The certification process is managed by admins and can be customized to suit your organization’s specific needs. If you’re not an admin, you can request item certification from an admin by selecting the item in the Fabric portal and then choosing “Request certification” from the “More” menu.

Note: For detailed information on the content endorsement process, refer to “Promote or certify content” in the Microsoft documentation.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/get-started/endorsement-promote-certify

Scan for Sensitive Data

Metadata scanning enhances data governance by enabling cataloging and reporting on all metadata associated with your organization’s Fabric items. The scanner API is a collection of Admin REST APIs that allows you to scan Fabric items for sensitive data. Utilize the scanner API to scan data warehouses, data pipelines, semantic models, reports, and dashboards for sensitive information. It can handle both structured and unstructured data.

Important: An admin needs to set up metadata scanning in your organization before it can be executed. Consult the “Metadata scanning overview” in the Microsoft documentation for further information.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/governance/metadata-scanning-overview

Track Data Lineage

Data lineage provides the ability to track the flow of data through Fabric. It allows you to visualize where data originates, how it’s transformed, and its final destinations. This understanding helps you comprehend the data available in Fabric and how it’s being utilized.

By leveraging these governance features, you can establish a well-structured and secure data environment within Microsoft Fabric, ensuring data quality, trust, and compliance throughout your organization.

In the upcoming sections, we’ll delve deeper into other aspects of Fabric administration, including capacity management and monitoring. Stay tuned to gain further insights into effectively managing your Fabric environment!

This blog post is based on information and concepts derived from the Microsoft Learn module titled “Administer Microsoft Fabric.” The original content can be found here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/administer-fabric/