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What is Microsoft Fabric administration?

Microsoft Fabric administration is the set of tasks and tools you use to configure, secure, and govern the Fabric software as a service (SaaS) platform across your organization. As an admin, you control tenant-wide settings, manage feature access to meet company policies and regulations, and delegate responsibilities so no single team becomes a bottleneck.

There are generally three categories of tasks that admins focus on to ensure the platform is configured correctly and compliant with organizational policies:

  • Administration—This Fabric administration documentation covers how to manage the Fabric platform, configure tenant and workspace features, and monitor usage and activity.
  • Security—See the Security documentation to learn how to help safeguard data with identity, access, encryption, and network protection settings.
  • Governance—See the Governance documentation to learn how to define and enforce policies for data access, sharing, classification, and auditing.

This article gives an overview of Fabric admin responsibilities, tools, and key tasks for managing your Fabric environment.

Admin tasks and tools for Fabric

Fabric admins use a combination of the Fabric admin portal and related admin tools to perform tasks based on their areas of responsibility. The following are common admin tasks and the tools typically used for each one.

Admin roles

Fabric defines several admin roles that determine what tasks a user can perform in the Microsoft Fabric environment. These roles include the Power Platform administrator, Fabric administrator, Capacity admin, and other specialized roles that allow delegation of responsibilities without giving full administrative access. For details about which types of admins can perform specific tasks, see Understand Fabric admin roles, Microsoft Entra built-in roles, and Microsoft 365 admin roles.

What is the admin portal?

The admin portal includes settings that govern Microsoft Fabric. For example, you can change tenant settings, access the Microsoft 365 admin portal, and control how users interact with Microsoft Fabric.

To access the admin portal, you need a Fabric license and a Fabric admin role. If you don't have one of these roles, you only see Capacity settings in the admin portal.

Admin portal features

The admin portal controls are listed in the following table, with links to relevant documentation.

Feature Description
Tenant settings Enable, disable, and configure Microsoft Fabric.
Users Manage users in the Microsoft 365 admin portal.
Power BI Premium Per-User (PPU) Configure auto refresh and semantic model workload settings.
Audit logs Audit Microsoft Fabric activities in the Microsoft Purview portal.
Domains Manage and organize business data using custom domains in Fabric.
Workloads Manage workloads and their settings.
Tags Manage tags for organizing content.
Capacity settings Manage Microsoft Fabric F, Power BI Premium P, and Power BI Embedded EM and A capacities.
Refresh summary Schedule refresh on a capacity and view the details of refreshes that occurred.
Embed codes View and manage the embed codes generated for your organization to share reports publicly.
Organizational visuals View, add, and manage which type of Power BI visuals users can access across the organization.
Organizational themes (preview) Manage and distribute custom report themes across the organization.
Azure connections Configure and manage connections to Azure resources.
Workspaces View and manage the workspaces that exist in your organization.
Custom branding Change the look and feel of Microsoft Fabric to match your organization's branding.
Fabric identities Govern the Fabric identities that exist in your organization.
Featured content Manage the reports, dashboards, and apps that were promoted to the Featured section on your Home page.

How to get to the admin portal

To get to the admin portal, sign in to Microsoft Fabric using your admin account credentials. Select the Settings (gear) icon, and then select Admin portal.

Screenshot of the Admin portal option on the Fabric settings menu.

Manage licenses and subscriptions

Fabric has two types of licenses that control how users and capacities can operate within the service: capacity licenses and per user licenses. To access the Fabric SaaS platform, you need a license of either type depending on whether you're consuming capacity resources or using Fabric as an individual user.

  • Capacity license - An organizational license that provides a pool of resources for Fabric operations. Capacity licenses are divided into stock keeping units (SKUs). Each SKU provides a different number of capacity units (CUs) that are used to calculate the capacity's compute power.

  • Per user license - Per user licenses allow users to work in Fabric.

To purchase licenses, you must be a Billing administrator. Billing administrators can buy licenses and control them with tools such as capacity pause and resume and scale.

After you purchase licenses, use the Microsoft 365 admin center, PowerShell, or the Azure portal to view and manage those licenses.

Turn off self-service sign-up and purchasing

Self-service lets individuals sign up, try, or buy Fabric or Power BI on their own. You might want to restrict self-service if a centralized admin team manages all licensing for your organization, or if your organization doesn't permit trials. To learn how to turn off self-service, see Enable or disable self-service.

Turning off self-service sign-up keeps users from exploring Fabric on their own. If you block individual sign-up, you might want to get Fabric (free) licenses for your organization and assign them to all users.

Take over a self-service subscription

As an admin, you can't assign or unassign licenses for a self-service purchase subscription bought by a user in your organization. You can take over a purchase or trial subscription, and then assign or unassign licenses.

View your subscriptions

To see which subscriptions your organization has, follow these steps.

  1. Sign in to the Microsoft 365 admin center.
  2. In the navigation menu, select Billing > Your products.

Your active Fabric and Power BI subscriptions are listed along with any other subscriptions you have.

Configure tenant settings

Admins can enable and disable global platform settings by controlling the Tenant settings. If your organization has one tenant, you can enable and disable settings for the entire organization from that tenant. Organizations with multiple tenants require an admin for each tenant. In multitenant organizations, appoint a central admin or team to manage settings across all tenants.

Capacity and workspace settings let you be more specific when you control your Fabric platform, because they apply to a specific capacity or workspace. Most Fabric experiences and features have their own settings, allowing control at an experience or feature level. For example, workspace administrators can customize Spark compute configuration settings.

Customize a Fabric tenant

Fabric is composed of tenants, capacities, and workspaces. Your organization might have one or more tenants, each with at least one capacity. Workspaces reside in capacities, and are where data is created, transformed, and consumed. Each organization can arrange its tenants, capacities, and workspaces based on its structure. For example, capacities can align with business functions like sales or marketing, and workspaces with each function's divisions.

Admins can control these processes throughout the organization. For example, you can create and delete workspaces, and control workspace settings such as Azure connections, Git integration, and Microsoft OneLake.

To share management across the organization, you can also use domains. A domain is a logical grouping of workspaces—for example, by function such as sales or marketing. You can assign domain admins who are closer to the subject matter, freeing Fabric administrators to focus on organizational processes while experts manage data in their fields.

Grant workspace permissions

In Fabric, workspace roles let workspace admins manage who can access data. Workspace roles determine which users can view, create, share, and delete Fabric items. As an admin, you can grant and revoke workspace roles, using them to control access to data in your organization. You can also create security groups and use them to control workspace access.

Manage users in Microsoft Fabric

Admins can manage Fabric users by using the Microsoft 365 admin center. Managing users includes adding and deleting users, groups, and admins. You can also manage per user licenses and assign admin roles.

Secure and govern data in Microsoft Fabric

Fabric provides tools that help admins manage and govern data across the organization. For example, you can use information protection capabilities to help protect sensitive information.

With governance and security tools, you can help keep your organization's data secure and compliant with your organizational policies.

Data residency is also supported in Fabric. As an admin, by deciding where your tenants and capacities are created, you can specify your organization's data storage location.

You can also control your organization's disaster recovery capacity setting to help keep your data safe if a disaster happens.

Delegate admin rights

To prevent bottlenecks, delegate admin rights to Capacity, Workspace, and Domain administrators. Delegating settings lets you distribute admin responsibilities across multiple roles and locations. For example, you can have organization-wide admins and team-specific admins who control settings at the capacity, workspace, or domain level. You can structure multiple admin levels based on your organization's needs.

Monitor Fabric usage and activity

Fabric provides several tools for monitoring platform usage. Use monitoring to comply with internal policies and regulations, review consumption and billing, and optimize resource allocation.

Admin monitoring workspace

To view the usage of Fabric features in your organization, use the feature usage and adoption report in the admin monitoring workspace. The report provides insights into consumption across the organization. You can also use its semantic model to create a tailored report for your organization.

Monitoring hub

The monitoring hub lets you review Fabric activities per experience. Using the hub, you can spot failed activities and see who submitted the activity and how long it lasted. The hub can expose many other details regarding each activity, and you can also filter and search it as needed.

View audit logs

Audit logs let you track user activities in Fabric. You can search the logs and see which operations were performed in your organization. Use audit logs to verify that policies are followed and to debug unexpected system behavior.

Understand capacity consumption

Fabric measures consumption in capacity units (CUs). With the Capacity Metrics app, admins can view consumption in their organization. This report helps you make informed decisions about your organizational resources. You can then take action by scaling a capacity up or down, pausing a capacity operation, optimizing query efficiency, or buying another capacity if needed.

Review Fabric bills

Admins can view their organization's bills to understand what their organization is paying for. You can compare your bill with your consumption to understand if and where your organization can make savings.

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