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Fabric Maps is a powerful geospatial visualization platform that transforms spatial data, whether static or real-time, into actionable intelligence. By uncovering patterns, relationships, and trends across space and time, Map reveals insights often missed in traditional charts and tables, helping you make informed decisions with greater clarity.
Map offers robust customization capabilities that let you tailor visualizations to your audience and data content. Overlay diverse data layers—such as bubbles, heatmaps, lines, polygons, and 3D extrusions—to represent complex spatial relationships. Each layer supports advanced styling options including color schemes, opacity, stroke width, interactive tooltips, and data labels. To enhance clarity and emphasize key insights, choose from multiple map styles like Grayscale, Road, Satellite, or Night.
For a high‑level overview of the Fabric Maps capability, see What is Fabric Maps?.
For instructions on how to create a map, see Create a map.
What is a map item?
A map is an interactive visualization canvas that lives in a Fabric workspace. Each map:
- Is stored as a Fabric item
- References one or more spatial data sources
- Renders data as layered geographic features on a basemap
- Supports both static and real‑time data
Unlike static images or exported visuals, map items remain connected to their underlying data and update automatically when the data changes.
Data sources used by maps
Maps don't store data directly. Instead, they reference spatial data stored in other Fabric items, including:
- Lakehouses for historical or batch spatial data (such as GeoJSON files)
- Eventhouses and KQL databases for streaming or near‑real‑time data
This separation allows you to govern, secure, and reuse your data independently of how it's visualized.
Static and real‑time mapping
Fabric Maps supports both static and real‑time scenarios:
- Static mapping is commonly used for datasets that change infrequently, such as boundaries, infrastructure, or environmental features.
- Real‑time mapping is used to visualize live data streams, such as asset locations, events, or operational telemetry.
The same map can combine both types of data, enabling side‑by‑side analysis of historical context and live activity.
Layers and visualization
Maps visualize data through layers. Each layer represents a dataset rendered in a geographic form, such as:
- Points
- Lines
- Polygons
- Heatmaps
- Extrusions
Layers can be styled independently to control appearance, interactivity, and visibility. This layered approach makes it possible to overlay multiple datasets and explore how they relate spatially.
Maps and tilesets
Maps and tilesets serve different purposes in Fabric Maps:
- A map is the visualization and interaction surface.
- A tileset is an optimized, preprocessed representation of large spatial datasets.
Tilesets are commonly used as data sources for maps when working with large or complex static datasets. For more information, see:
Map item permissions
Maps are Fabric items stored in a workspace and are governed by Fabric's permission model. Access to a map depends on workspace roles, map-level sharing, and permissions on the underlying data sources.
To understand how permissions work in Fabric Maps, see Permissions in Fabric Maps.
When to use a map
Use a map when you need to:
- Explore data by geographic location
- Monitor live spatial activity
- Combine historical and real‑time spatial data
- Share interactive geographic insights with others
Maps are particularly well suited for operational intelligence, routing, asset tracking, and location‑based analytics scenarios.
Next steps
To learn how to create and configure a map:
To customize map appearance and behavior:
To understand the broader Fabric Maps capability:
For a tutorial demonstrating an end-to-end mapping scenario: