Supervise the use of Microsoft Fabric

Already one month since the official announcement of Microsoft Fabric and his public Preview: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-microsoft-fabric-data-analytics-for-the-era-of-ai/

Since then, I have been supporting customers in their Preview journey and having seen recurrent questions from {Power BI} Fabric Administrator, I thought about authoring this small article to share some guidance for supervising the use and support adoption of great new features.

?? Disclaimer, I am not part of the product group, this is my own thought based on my current knowledge and service features available as of now (2023/06/30) ?? #msftadvocate

For feedbacks or ideas on the service feel free to use the dedicated portal: https://ideas.fabric.microsoft.com/

1 - Enabling?

Microsoft Fabric is currently in preview and existing Power BI customers can simply turn on Fabric through the Power BI admin portal. But?after July 1, 2023,?Fabric?will be?enabled?for?all Power BI tenants?(Fabric trial) unless you explicitly opt out:

You can enable Microsoft Fabric for the entire tenant or for specific Power BI Premium capacity. In both cases, you can use security groups to provide Microsoft Fabric access to a specified list of users:

Now that Microsoft Fabric item creation has been enabled, let’s see how users can create and use those new artifacts.

A) Microsoft Fabric capacity can be purchased from Azure (PAYG) and users who have Pro license and access to this Capacity will be able to create and use those new workloads:

B) Fabric administrators can enable trials for paid features so when users sign up for a Microsoft Fabric trial they can use for free for 60 days (Learn More).

?? This setting is at a tenant level and is applied to all users or to specific security groups and applies to?both?Power BI and Fabric trials.

When you start a Fabric (Preview) trial, Microsoft provisions one 64 capacity unit (CU) trial capacity. You might not be able to start a trial if your tenant has exhausted its limit of trial capacities (10 as for now). If that’s the case, you could Purchase a Fabric capacity from Azure, request another trial capacity, ask user to share their trial capacity, cancel it or try increasing tenant trial capacity limits by reaching out Microsoft support.

C) Power BI Premium Capacity administrators can turn on Microsoft Fabric at the capacity level (as described int the previous section), allowing anyone with access to this capacity to use the new Fabric experiences.

??Users that don't have Microsoft Fabric enabled (Fabric trial) will be able to view Microsoft Fabric icons and items if they have at least read-only access to workspace or capacity with Fabric items.

To disable Microsoft Fabric, you can turn off the Microsoft Fabric (Preview) admin switch, users will have view only permission for Microsoft Fabric items and if you disable Microsoft Fabric for a specific capacity this will only affect it. Even after turning off Fabric Tenant Settings, Fabric’s artifacts and associated data don’t get deleted automatically.

As a user if you cancel Fabric trial from the Account manager, the trial capacity with all its workspaces and their contents will be deleted and you may not be able to start another trial so if you want to retain your data you should purchase a capacity and migrate your workspaces to that capacity.

2 – Monitoring?

Tenant Settings should be backed and monitored, see how to achieve that task from my previous article using Fabric REST APIs?Get Tenant Settings: Microsoft Fabrics Monitoring Tenant Settings.

The Monitoring hub?enables users to monitor various Microsoft Fabric activities, such as dataset refresh, Spark Job runs and many others, from a central location:

To support Tenant governance and monitoring, Microsoft recently released the?Admin monitoring?workspace from which admins can perform security and governance tasks such as audits and usage checks:

The?Feature Usage and Adoption Report?is a comprehensive report of usage and adoption of the features in Microsoft Fabric:

You can also create custom reports on top of the same “Feature Usage and Adoption” dataset:

In Fabric, user activities are logged in the Power BI activity log and in the unified audit log. You can retrieve them for tracking purposes in the same way as in Power BI (Track user activities in Power BI) but currently only create, read, update, and delete operations are available for Fabric items.

The?Microsoft Fabric utilization and metrics app?is designed to provide monitoring capabilities for Microsoft Fabric capacities and resource consumption:

To support organizations in using new fabric workload, their usage will not impact Power BI Premium resources before August 1st, 2023 >>> Until this date Microsoft are not charging the capacities for the preview workloads. Today organizations can monitor the resource consumption of those workloads in Preview following “Background Preview %” & “Interactive Preview %”?activities:

As for now, Fabric administrators can't view metrics for individual capacities Fabric (preview) trial.

The Azure Log Analytics in Power BI is only able to monitor the Power BI Dataset activity logs (such as Analysis Services engine traces).

?? Fabric capacities smaller than F64 (equivalent to Premium P1) require a Pro License for report consumption: Microsoft Fabric licenses.

In regards of the compute resources required for Power BI DirectLake mode: Resources will be consumed to transform, enrich, and store delta/parquet files in the OneLake using Spark or Dataflow, then compute required for querying the data should be the same as it’s today with Power BI, but no more resources will be required for Data Refresh ??

3 – Conclusion

Microsoft Fabric is a SaaS service where you no longer need to worry about managing PaaS resources like clusters.?Having said that the need of Administrator still true and here are some recommendations, reading, learning:

- Follow Public training Get started with Microsoft Fabric

- Follow End to End tutorials: End-to-end tutorials in Microsoft Fabric

- Be familiar with Microsoft Fabric terminology

- Understand Microsoft Fabric admin roles

- What is Microsoft Fabric administration?

- Be familiar with updates of the Roles in workspaces in Microsoft Fabric

- Be familiar with the term of use of the Preview Microsoft Fabric preview information

- Monitor the usage of Microsoft Fabric items to better support adoption.

- Be familiar with all new artifacts and workloads and know when to use the appropriate one:

o??Fabric decision guide - copy activity, dataflow, or Spark

o??Fabric decision guide - lakehouse or data warehouse

- Monitor Fabric (Preview) trial known issues

- Follow Blog Microsoft Fabric

- Share Microsoft Fabric Community