Understand Microsoft Fabric Administration

0:00Welcome to the content introducing you to Microsoft Fabric.

0:04The DP600 certification exam is an evolution of

0:09the previous Data Engineering Administrator exam,

0:13which was the DP 500 exam.

0:15However, the brand new thing is, in fact, Microsoft Fabric.

0:19It is the evolution of how data is managed both within Azure,

0:25as well as through the Power BI service.

0:27They've given us one single pane of glass,

0:30one lens to look through to manage and administer an engineer,

0:34all of our data that could be spread across

0:38all of our different resources,

0:39whether in Power BI, whether in Azure.

0:42Now we get one place to go to log into to manage it all.

0:46Now it really begins with Microsoft Fabric,

0:49and under the hood is something that we call OneLake.

0:51So this set of videos is largely going to be focused on

0:54introducing you to OneLake and the key terms and

0:58the engineering of how it works under the hood.

1:01We'll also dabble in the Power BI service,

1:05aka the Fabric Service,

1:07where we enable things like working with Microsoft Fabric,

1:10and then start to explore and understand things like

1:13the administrator panels.

1:15So without further ado,

1:16let's get introduced to Microsoft Fabric.

0:00So here's the thing, the analytics landscape has changed quite a bit,

0:05especially the Microsoft

0:07analytics landscape.

0:10The tools that we used, even the certification exams that we take have changed

0:15tremendously

0:16in just the last six months, at least at the time that I'm recording this.

0:20I mean, really, it does feel like just a year ago, I recorded the DP 500

0:26certification exam.

0:28And it seems like almost overnight, all of that was made mostly irrelevant and

0:33replaced

0:34by the DP 600 certification exam, because they've created an entirely new

0:40comprehensive

0:41analytics platform to manage the entire analytics suite soup to nuts.

0:47So let's think for a moment, what does it even mean to work in analytics?

0:52What are the things that change quite frequently in analytics?

0:57I'm going to start off using the yellow color here.

1:01And I'm going to say over here on the right hand side, we have power BI.

1:07But really what I'm talking about here is the front end, AKA the visualization

1:16side.

1:17When most people think about power BI, they're not actually thinking about the

1:22real meat

1:23and potatoes that power BI brings to the table.

1:26They're usually thinking about charts.

1:29Maybe there's a pie chart, there's a line chart.

1:33Maybe there's bar charts.

1:35And of course they're thinking about the slicers

1:37that allow you to drill down and filter out the data.

1:41And ultimately we're thinking about visualization

1:44and consumption of data.

1:47Many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many people.

1:50Now I don't have statistics.

1:52I'm not gonna say most, but if I had to guess,

1:55I would guess most, many people,

1:57and maybe most people, begin their analytics journey here.

2:02The thing that draws them to analytics

2:05is turning data into interactive data visualizations

2:10that people can easily see, visualize, and digest

2:15what is going on with their business,

2:17what is going on with their data.

2:19The truth is, is that this is the final step

2:23in what is a larger data pipeline.

2:27The amount of work that has to get the data to this point

2:31is absolutely tremendous.

2:32What we usually have happen is a three-tier journey,

2:38but I'm actually gonna break it up into a four-tier journey.

2:41First of all, we have data creation.

2:46Where does the data that generates these charts,

2:49these beautiful visualizations,

2:51where does it actually come from in the first place?

2:54It comes from our various apps,

2:57where various applications that we have

3:00throughout our business.

3:01Now, immediately we think about things

3:04like a sales database.

3:07We think about things like transactions,

3:11exchanging of dollars, selling a product for price, revenue.

3:16That's what really makes a business go, isn't it?

3:20So we may have a front-end website

3:23that sells products online,

3:25we charge someone's credit card,

3:27and that sale is recorded in this database.

3:30But what else do we have?

3:32We might have a CRM,

3:35where we're actually doing things

3:36like tracking the progress of a relationship

3:40with our customer.

3:41We might be inputting details about,

3:44what's their kids' names, or what's their birthday,

3:47what college did they go to,

3:49details about the customer that help us build

3:51that long-term relationship and solicitation.

3:55We might have HR applications.

3:58Sure, we gotta know what's going on with our staff,

4:01and how do we track their metrics?

4:04It might not be a sales-driven metric

4:07that determines a employee's success, is it?

4:11It really depends on what that job role is.

4:14We also might have accounting applications.

4:18And I say multiple applications,

4:19because it's very common to see something like

4:22expense reports in a separate application

4:29from, say, QuickBooks,

4:33where we actually manage the books themselves.

4:36Then, in the middle of all of this,

4:39we have power users who have flat files.

4:44Those are gonna be like our Excel files, our CSV files,

4:48and so on.

4:49All of these are things that generate and create data.

4:54Someone is logging into each of these pieces

4:58and entering new fields, entering new records.

5:01And we see immediately there's a pretty big disconnect

5:07that happens right here between the data visualization

5:11and where the data actually lives.

5:14The data is scattered out all over the place.

5:16Beyond that, the data is probably not standardized

5:21from one application to the next.

5:23For instance, let's say we have a CRM and we have HR.

5:27Both of these track data about people,

5:30and very frequently we collect things like addresses.

5:34In the United States, we have, well, states.

5:39Who's to say the CRM might not abbreviate Louisiana as LA,

5:44whereas HR might actually record this

5:49as something like 27, just by an identifier or an ID,

5:53or maybe it writes Louisiana out entirely.

5:58So now all of a sudden our data is inconsistent

6:03from one application to the next.

6:06Asking our front-end developers to account for all of the data

6:10spread out all over the place, and its inconsistencies,

6:14and adding new data sources as they become available,

6:18and importing them all on a schedule

6:20is just an overwhelming burden

6:23for any medium to large enterprise.

6:25Even small businesses can generate a huge amount of data.

6:29I've seen it with my own eyes.

6:32So somewhere in the middle of all of this,

6:35we need to pick up all of our data,

6:38standardize it, and store it in a place

6:41that can actually collect and query this data.

6:44This is where we usually see things like ETL come into play.

6:50That is extract, transform, and load.

6:55What are we extracting?

6:56Well, we're pulling the data out

6:58of all of these different sources.

7:00We're extracting it out,

7:01and usually we do this on a schedule.

7:05Sometimes we might do it daily, we might do it weekly,

7:07we might even do it monthly,

7:09depending on the velocity of our data,

7:13how frequently is it changing or updated,

7:16and how frequently do we need to consume it?

7:19So we'll have some sort of application

7:21that connects to all of these different data sources,

7:24runs queries, and pulls out the latest and greatest data.

7:28We're gonna put that data somewhere,

7:31but as it's in flight, going from the source,

7:35we're gonna perform our transformations.

7:38This is where we standardize and clean our data.

7:42When I say clean, I'm talking about things

7:44like handling null values or removing duplicate records.

7:48So we'll put standardize, clean,

7:54and I will put transform here,

7:59because we also might do things like perform math,

8:03and add that to a new column

8:08at the end of a table or something like that.

8:11And then lastly, we will load that data

8:16into some sort of warehouse,

8:18or what is now known as a lake house

8:21in the Microsoft world.

8:23And this is where we actually start to transition

8:25and shift our focus to the exact DP600 certification exam

8:30and really introduce the big, big topic du jour,

8:34and that is one lake.

8:36And for that matter, Microsoft Fabric, really in general.

8:41Let's bring up a new color to talk about this.

8:42I'm gonna bring up the kind of the greenish color,

8:45because that is the Fabric idea.

8:48Microsoft Fabric is now basically combining

8:52what was the Power BI service

8:55and the Azure Data Storage and Analytics platform

9:00that you might have known as sign apps.

9:02This was really prevalent in the DP500 series,

9:05where if you wanted to be an analytics professional

9:08working with Microsoft,

9:09you are working with Power BI,

9:13logging into the Power BI service

9:15and the Power BI platform,

9:16then separately logging into Azure

9:20to maybe work with the sign apps analytics workspace.

9:25So here you might do some data transformation,

9:29loading and visualization.

9:31Here you might actually do the transformation

9:34and loading and a little bit of visualization.

9:37Frequently these two interacted with each other,

9:39but for the most part,

9:40they were separate applications

9:43with probably the same login,

9:45but different roles and permissions.

9:47And it really felt like they were connected,

9:50but still two separate tools

9:52that an analytics professional had to deal with.

9:55Now you could think about it as all under one login

10:00and one permission set in Microsoft Fabric.

10:03Microsoft Fabric introduces the concept of one lake.

10:09When we think about data lakes,

10:13data lakes in general,

10:14just the general term means a humongous amount of data

10:19stored in a single place.

10:21From there, we might pick up the data, transform it,

10:26load it into a data warehouse and analyze it.

10:29With Microsoft Fabric and the advent of one lake,

10:33you can think about the entire analytics platform

10:36in one pane of glass that you can look at and log into.

10:41With one lake, we'll have all of our major analytics job roles

10:46stored in one place.

10:48For instance, we'll handle all of our data warehousing

10:52within the one lake platform visible through Microsoft Fabric.

10:58Now when we think of data warehousing,

11:01what I want you to now think about is Microsoft Lakehouse.

11:06That's what this is now really called.

11:08Lakehouse behind the scenes uses Azure data lake storage

11:13for files or it uses a data warehouse style database,

11:20which is basically a database that you could load

11:25but has analytics abilities built on top of it.

11:29So what you will see for all of your warehousing needs

11:32is a lake house and you'll get to choose

11:34if you want to load it via files or just raw data

11:38behind the scenes that'll be using Azure data lake storage

11:42or warehousing analytics platforms.

11:45But you won't have to worry about that

11:47because you'll just be looking at it

11:49through the Microsoft Fabric pane of glass

11:52that is the lake house.

11:53We'll be able to do our data engineering tasks.

11:59This could be using big data platforms

12:04very frequently we're seeing this with things like Spark

12:09and it does go hand in hand with data science as well.

12:13We'll absolutely have the ability to use notebooks

12:17to manage and analyze our data as well,

12:19performing machine learning and AI tasks.

12:22We'll have multiple options for integration.

12:28When we see integration, you should be thinking ETL.

12:34This actually uses things like the Power BI data flows

12:38which are for dare I say smaller ETL workflows

12:43versus data pipelines,

12:46which is going to be a much larger robust ETL pipeline

12:51for moving large amounts of data into things like lake houses.

12:55And then of course, we'll have things

12:58like our business intelligence and real time intelligence

13:03for streaming and visualization.

13:06So this used to be two separate tools,

13:10Azure Sign Apps Analytics and Power BI.

13:13Now we log in to Microsoft Fabric

13:16and we view it all in the pane of OneLake.

13:19In the next video, we're actually going to get licensed

13:23to do this.

13:24It's important to understand that these things

13:26aren't really free, especially if you want

13:29to go for the DP600 certification exam.

13:33Then once we're licensed, we can log into Fabric

13:36and view these are each called experiences.

13:41You'll be able to see the warehousing experience,

13:44the integration experiences, the Power BI experiences

13:48from within Fabric.

13:50And that's really when it'll click and go,

13:52"Oh, if I was coming from the analytics workspace previously,

13:55I remembered having to log into Azure

13:57versus logging into Power BI.

14:00And I'll some of it might have been in Power BI

14:02with data flows and some of it might have been in Azure

14:06with Azure Data Factory.

14:07Now it's all one place.

14:09It's all in Fabric.

14:11And all of the data and data operations are part of OneLake.

14:15So with that understanding under our belt,

14:17in the next video, we'll get licensed

14:20and we'll start poking around in the Fabric Portal.

0:00So before we jump into the portal and start licensing and clicking away,

0:04I want you to make sure you understand how this is licensed and paid for.

0:09This is not really free to begin with.

0:12Microsoft Fabric and Power BI can potentially be two separate products that

0:18need to be licensed separately.

0:21Microsoft Fabric is basically provisioning the capacity to perform all of our

0:27compute workloads.

0:29Data moving, data being transformed, data being loaded.

0:33I mean, we could do a lot. We could do a lot. We could use a lot of horsepower

0:37to do those operations.

0:39So Microsoft can't offer that up for free.

0:42So we got to pay for Microsoft Fabric license, specifically a capacity license

0:48to basically provision capacity in what is ultimately Azure behind the scenes

0:53to actually do our data operations.

0:56Now that still doesn't mean that we're completely off the hook,

0:59we may also need a Power BI license to perform our Power BI operations,

1:06hosting data privately, governance privately, sharing data privately,

1:11as well as performing a lot of compute operations in the Power BI space.

1:17There is an overlap of the two though.

1:20Let me scroll up a little bit and show you this grid.

1:23Here we have our Fabric licenses. They all begin with F.

1:29Here we have our Power BI licenses.

1:33If you buy a Power BI capacity license,

1:39capacity license of a P or above.

1:45So that's P1, 2, 3, 4, or 5,

1:48then you automatically get the Fabric license that joins that.

1:55The A/E series or the EM series do not count.

2:00If you instead buy Power BI Pro or Power BI premium per user,

2:10they also do not count.

2:12You will have to separately provision Fabric and Fabric capacity.

2:17Let's say you buy Power BI Pro and assign it to yourself.

2:21You log in to the Fabric login space,

2:25all you will see is the Power BI experience.

2:29You won't be able to do things like create data flows.

2:31You won't be able to do things like access to Lakehouse.

2:34It just simply won't be there.

2:36Now the thing about this is Power BI capacity and Fabric capacity

2:41are stored at the tenant level.

2:44If you're a single organization that has one single Azure login,

2:49aka a single intra-ID,

2:51that is where you're going to be configuring and subscribing

2:56to your Power BI capacity or Fabric capacity license.

3:00Power BI Pro and Power BI premium per user

3:04are of course on a per user basis.

3:07So it's possible that you'll assign Fabric capacity

3:11to your organization and premium per user

3:15to your individual users and mix and match them that way.

3:18In fact, that's what I'm going to do.

3:21But also keep in mind that more complex scenarios,

3:24maybe you have two tenants,

3:26like this one, the military tenant and a commercial tenant.

3:30Well, guess what? That means you need two capacity licenses,

3:33one for each tenant.

3:35It's also possible to create separate capacity licenses.

3:39Let me change colors here for a second

3:41and use something a little more visible on that yellow there.

3:46We'll do this.

3:47You could have a capacity for just US operations

3:51that might be for US marketing, US sales and US finance.

3:55A separate UK capacity, a separate Germany capacity

3:59for each of those operations.

4:01Instead of sharing capacity across your entire tenant,

4:04you could buy separate tiers,

4:06if maybe that's a little more affordable for you.

4:09Now scrolling down a little bit, we see we do have

4:11the lower end tiers of the Fabric capacity.

4:16Capacity units being very small

4:18and therefore very small Power BI V cores

4:21that would be associated with this.

4:22This would be for a very small organization.

4:26Notice things that say this.

4:29If you're smaller than an F64,

4:31it'll require a Power BI Pro or premium per user license.

4:36Or at least a trial to consume Power BI content.

4:39Well, the DP600 wants us to know both.

4:42How did you fabric as well as Power BI?

4:45So guess what?

4:46The most affordable way for us to ease into this

4:49is to start off with a small F2 capacity

4:53and using something like the Power BI premium per user license.

4:57So how do we get started doing this?

5:00Well, the kind of ironic thing about this.

5:02Remember the whole point of making fabric

5:06was so that we didn't have to log into Azure

5:08versus log into Power BI?

5:09Well, in order to do this,

5:13in order to provision fabric capacity,

5:16we have to log into Azure and buy a capacity license.

5:19In order to get the Power BI premium license,

5:23we'll have to pivot and go to the Microsoft 365 login.

5:28So I'm going to first go to the Azure portal.

5:30I'm going to get signed in with my Azure portal account.

5:33It's going to blow up on me a couple of times

5:35because the token that's cached is not the right token.

5:38So we'll get logged in eventually here.

5:40And there we go.

5:42I get logged in.

5:44So what did I say we need?

5:45We need a fabric capacity license.

5:47So we'll search for fabric in the Azure portal.

5:50I'll go to Microsoft fabric here,

5:52and I'll create a fabric capacity for my tenant.

5:55I'll put this under the correct subscription.

5:58We'll put this in.

6:00Let's create a new resource group for this,

6:01calling it the DP600 resource group and click OK.

6:05And then I'll give this a capacity name.

6:08We'll call this MSFAB cap for capacity.

6:12Now I'm not going to do the F64.

6:14I'm just going to do the F2,

6:15and importantly, you'll see why.

6:17Look at the estimated costs per month.

6:19Well, you know, this is going to be on mine or my employer's credit card.

6:23So I want to minimize these costs for now,

6:25and then scale up as I need them.

6:28So I'll start small with Select,

6:31and we'll choose myself as the fabric capacity administrator.

6:34But noticing I cannot proceed

6:37because the resource provider needs to be registered

6:40with my subscription first.

6:42Now this is a common thing when new features come available in Azure.

6:47An entirely new Microsoft feature with an entirely new name space

6:52pops up and it's not automatically unlocked by your subscription.

6:57So what we're going to do is we're going to jump into that and unlock that

7:00first.

7:01So what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump into the subscription

7:04that I'm trying to unlock this for.

7:05This is in Pay as You Go.

7:07Under Settings right here,

7:09we're going to look for resource providers.

7:11And then we're going to search for the provider name when it loads up.

7:16Let's search for fabric.

7:17We see Microsoft fabric right here is not currently registered.

7:22So let's select it and hit Register.

7:25Now it will take a few minutes for this actually to kick in.

7:28So we'll let it sit here and spin for a second and come back to it when it's

7:32done.

7:32Even though it says here it is with the green checkmark,

7:34it still takes time for the backend resources in Azure to all sync up globally

7:40before this becomes totally available.

7:42So feel free to pause right here if you're following along.

7:46Pause, go take a five minute break, and come back when it's done.

7:49Okay, after waiting a few minutes now,

7:52what I'm going to do is I'm going to navigate back to fabric.

7:55We'll go into Microsoft fabric.

7:57We'll create the fabric capacity again.

7:59We'll now check out this subscription.

8:02I created a DP 600.

8:05Oh, I didn't create that because I didn't get to create it

8:07because I didn't get to finish what I was doing in the previous step.

8:11So we'll start by creating the new DP 600 again.

8:13We'll call this bad cap one more time for fabric capacity.

8:18I'm okay with this being in the central US.

8:20I am going to change the capacity again to F2,

8:24and I'm going to leave myself as the fabric capacity administrator.

8:27Notice I don't have any errors anymore because we've registered that provider.

8:31So I'll choose review and create and create.

8:34So it'll take a few minutes to deploy this capacity.

8:38And when that's done, we'll pivot to actually assigning myself a power BI

8:45license.

8:45Okay, so my fabric capacity has been provisioned.

8:49Everything looks good here.

8:50If I go to the resource, we see there it is.

8:53My F2 license for this tenant and that subscription is now good.

8:58So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to give myself a power BI license.

9:03To do this, I'm actually going to go to admin.office.com,

9:06which is giving me a DNS problem.

9:09Let's try a different way to get in there.

9:10Let's go to login.microsoftonline.com,

9:14signing into the account that I'm already signed in with.

9:18And then from here, I'm going to jump to the admin portal by clicking on admin.

9:23Now that I'm in the admin portal, we can buy a new license under billing.

9:27So I'll go to purchase services.

9:28And from here, I'm just going to search for power.

9:33And sure enough, right here, I see power BI premium per user.

9:39I'm not looking for the add-on license for Power BI Pro.

9:43I'm looking for the full-blown Power BI premium per user.

9:47So I'll click details here and we're going to buy one.

9:50Let's just do the Power BI premium per user.

9:52I need one license on a month to month basis.

9:55$24 total per month is what that's going to cost me.

9:58I'll click buy.

9:59And after going through the checkout process,

10:01I now have purchased the license and I can now go through the process of

10:05assigning that to myself.

10:07So I'll find my account right here and we'll go ahead and make sure we are

10:12ready to assign a license.

10:14So let's do manage product licenses.

10:16And of course, I'm going to check my Power BI premium per user license right

10:21here and save those changes.

10:23So now my tenant has Microsoft fabric capacity and I have Power BI premium per

10:30user assigned.

10:31So I should have what I need now to actually begin labbing and working through

10:36this entire environment.

10:38How can I go to find out?

10:39Well, again, it may take some time for all of these licenses to actually sync

10:46through the back end

10:48and actually apply and unlock all the resources that you have.

10:52So if you go to the fabric login right now, let's go to app.fabric.microsoft.

10:59com

10:59and log in if you don't see all those features immediately unlocked,

11:04don't freak out because they might become available after some time.

11:10Now let me zoom in just a little bit here so that we can see a little bit

11:13better.

11:13When I click on the profile icon at the top, I do immediately see that my

11:18license type is premium

11:19per user and that's a really good sign. Now, what about the fabric capacity

11:25license that we've done?

11:27What we want to do when we want to start working with our fabric capacities, we

11:30begin

11:31by creating a workspace. Now, what I want you to think about with workspaces is

11:35this is where

11:37a collection of related work will be grouped. Like we kind of saw with this

11:42diagram. Let me show you.

11:44Scroll up back here on this licensing. See, they did a marketing workspace, a

11:48sales workspace,

11:49a finance workspace. It kind of makes sense like that where business units are

11:55grouped together

11:56like that. So what I might do over here in Power BI is I might create a new

12:01workspace and call this

12:04sales. Something simple like that. It tells me this name is available. Now

12:08check this out. I

12:08could give it a description. I could assign it a special domain or I could even

12:13upload an image so

12:14that other users can see it and understand what it looks like. When I go to

12:18advanced, I'll see

12:19who the contacts are that can work with this, but then importantly, how is it

12:23licensed?

12:24When I choose fabric capacity like so, it shows me what are my capacity

12:30licenses that I can use.

12:32So there's the fab cap in central US license that I provisioned for my tenant

12:37and that's what I

12:38want to use. So I'll click apply and that will provision my workspace. So at

12:44this point, we've

12:45now gotten logged in to the fabric portal. We've confirmed that I have both my

12:51Power BI premium

12:53license and my capacity license up and running and we've created a workspace.

12:58The one last thing

12:58that I want to add in is if you had any troubles doing that, you may need to

13:02enable fabric in

13:05your tenancy first. If you have an existing tenant, particularly an old one,

13:10fabric might not be

13:11enabled by default. So when you're a Power BI admin or a global admin, what you

13:17can do is you can

13:18actually click the gear right here and we'll jump to the admin portal down here

13:24in governance and

13:25insights. Then we say got it right here. Then what we can do is you can see

13:29right here,

13:30users can create fabric items. Make sure that this is flipped to enabled. And

13:36for now, we can leave

13:37it on the entire organization. Just like we created a fabric workspace, that

13:42would be a fabric item

13:43that needs to be enabled. Now turning this on or off doesn't impact anything

13:48related to Power BI.

13:50But if we're going to be working with fabric, creating fabric pipelines, data

13:54flows, working

13:55with the lake house, this needs to be turned on. So this at least gets us

14:01started and in the door.

14:02Now that we're here, we'll take a look about some of the other things that you

14:07have here,

14:08like data workflows, real time dashboards and more.

0:00Now, before I jump into the admin portal and start talking about this, there's

0:04one important

0:05thing that I want you to pay close attention to.

0:08And this took me a while to discover this.

0:10It actually took me digging through forum posts.

0:13You see this down here, this Power BI icon?

0:18This is where if we're in fabric and we want to change from Power BI to say

0:23pipelines or

0:24data flows or analytics workspaces or something, we can actually click this to

0:29check the data

0:29change, which known as the experience into a different construction ability.

0:35See, we can actually leverage sign apps to do data engineering, signants.

0:39There's the warehouse.

0:40There's the factory, real time intelligence.

0:43You might have noticed in my previous videos that this button wasn't there.

0:48Kind of a big deal.

0:50Why is that the case?

0:52Why did this button disappear or why was it not clickable?

0:56It's because the fabric that I had provisioned, the fabric capacity that I

1:03created in Azure

1:05in a previous video, I put it in the central US.

1:10And it turns out that fabric, it'll let you provision this fabric capacity

1:17everywhere,

1:18even if fabric itself is not currently there.

1:22Click this out to actually see the real fabric region availability.

1:27This is where you need to go to actually get the right fabric.

1:33So what I did is I looked down here in the Americas and I noticed there is no

1:36central

1:37US, there's north central US and south central US, but no central US.

1:42So I went back into Azure and I repurvisioned it to be in south central US.

1:48And sure enough, now in Power BI, I have the ability to change my experiences

1:54based on

1:54the workspace that I'm currently working in.

1:57So if I go into workspaces, I can now create a new workspace and we'll call

2:03this new fab

2:05wk spc for workspace.

2:08I'll go into advanced and I'll make sure this is under fabric capacity in the

2:11south central

2:12US and click apply.

2:15And now I actually have a workspace that has the ability to leverage the

2:20different Microsoft

2:22fabric tools.

2:23So I wanted to make sure before we went on that we got that thing straight

2:26because that

2:27is an important thing to get right.

2:29So shout out to whoever created this post originally can't not I cannot see any

2:35other

2:35experiences other than Power BI, but want to use data science and data

2:39engineering.

2:40That's where I found out there's actually limitations to the regions that you

2:43can provision this

2:44in.

2:45Now, I guess I just never noticed this before throughout my journey and

2:49throughout my career

2:51because I had been operating in East US, which already had fabric provision for

2:56this

2:56particular demo when I chose central US.

3:00That's where I was surprised that this region availability wasn't already there

3:04.

3:04So clearing out my empty tabs.

3:06Now that we have that handled cool, we're back here in the admin workspace, the

3:13Microsoft

3:14fabric workspace.

3:15If I go here and click the gear and go down to the admin portal, I want to make

3:20sure that

3:21you see that there is a lot of stuff going on here.

3:26A lot of this is really security configurations where you get to control what

3:32is or isn't

3:32possible for the users that you're currently working with.

3:36For instance, we took a look at users can create fabric items.

3:41It's like fabric workspaces and then data flows or data pipelines or using

3:47things like

3:48in the lake house.

3:49The thing that you actually need to pay close attention to, the thing that will

3:52help you

3:52figure out what's going on because there's so many configurations.

3:56Look, look at all of these configurations just for tenant settings.

4:01See I'm still scrolling.

4:04Just tenant settings still scrolling.

4:06Yeah, this is the bottom.

4:09There's that many configurations just for this section.

4:13Then you've got this, you've got this, you've got this, you've got, it goes on

4:21and on and

4:21there's a lot of settings here.

4:23The thing that I want you to notice is actually the italicized stuff.

4:27This actually shows you what is it currently configured for.

4:32So if we see users can create and use data workflows, it's currently disabled.

4:37Well, that's something that I actually want to use.

4:40So I'll flip this to enabled and leave it okay for the entire organization and

4:44click

4:44apply.

4:45Now the italics change to enabled for the entire organization.

4:51Database mirroring could be a really beneficial thing to have continuously repl

4:56icating data

4:57from an external database into fabrics one lake using delta tables.

5:02That's basically the database side, not the file side.

5:06So I'll turn that on too and say, hey, that could be really useful.

5:08I'm going to apply that.

5:09Now notice tenant settings will be applied within the next 15 minutes.

5:13It's not automatic.

5:14You could think behind the scenes, they're scraping changes and pulling them in

5:19to the

5:19entire workspace.

5:20So don't expect them to be instantaneous.

5:22Users won't see these instantaneous.

5:25I also think publish get help information, which is disabled by default is kind

5:30of interesting.

5:31But this is where you would actually publish your own URLs for help.

5:35It's a pretty cool one.

5:37If you ask me as an administrator who might be wanting to make changes, you

5:41might actually

5:41create documentation that'll help people learn how to use and consume the items

5:47.

5:47Getting emails for service outages or incidents really big for an administrator

5:51to understand

5:52when something goes wrong, that's not your fault.

5:55This is actually a huge win that you could get for yourself immediately by just

5:59being

5:59notified when something goes wrong.

6:02Now in order to do this, you have to specify a security group to notify a group

6:06of people,

6:07not an individual.

6:08So I'm going to turn this back off for just a moment.

6:12Workspace settings.

6:13We definitely want to allow our users or developers to create workspaces.

6:18I also don't want my users to be able to reassign their personal workspace, aka

6:24my workspace,

6:25into the fabric capacity.

6:28So I'm actually going to turn this on and click apply.

6:31Here's a fun one.

6:32Information protection.

6:34Allow users to apply sensitivity labels for content.

6:38You can also apply sensitivity labels from data sources to their data in Power

6:44BI.

6:44I also like automatically applying sensitivity labels to downstream content.

6:50So if it gets set somewhere and then consumed somewhere else, that sensitivity

6:54label will

6:55follow the data.

6:56Another really big one is data exporting and sharing.

7:00By default, we want to stop users from data sharing or from externally sharing

7:05data.

7:06Do we also want to stop users from accepting external data shares?

7:10Primately so, we want our data to come through our data pipelines rather than

7:14from other

7:14users.

7:16Guest access is also going to be a big deal, and this is a particularly

7:20interesting one,

7:21published to web.

7:22With this enabled, this actually allows users to potentially publish data to

7:27the public

7:28information.

7:30It also means dashboards or visualizations can be consumed by the public.

7:35Now part of it is stopped because users are not allowed to create embed codes,

7:40which is

7:40one of the items that are required.

7:43And it also says to enable publish to web, you need to disable block public

7:47internet access

7:48first.

7:49Quite frankly, there are a lot of things that we're going to spend more time

7:53talking

7:53about later, like certification and featured content too.

7:57The point is, is I want you to take a look at the admin portal and understand

8:02there are

8:02a huge amount of things to do.

8:06Something that I want you to be aware of right now is allowing XMLA endpoints

8:10and analyze

8:11in Excel with on-premises semantic models.

8:14XMLA endpoints are part of the certification exam, so we want to make sure that

8:19this is

8:20allowed.

8:21And the ability to execute queries over REST API is going to be really

8:25important using DAX

8:27expressions.

8:28We might use this with something like DAX Explorer or tabular editor.

8:33Other single sign-on capabilities like snowflake, redshift or big query.

8:39So if we want people to be able to sign in with something like their redshift

8:42account

8:43or snowflake account, this is where we could configure that.

8:47Now this is just the admin portal and this is just tenant settings.

8:51Something else that you might be interested in might be capacity settings.

8:55Now I'm going to discard all of these changes.

8:57I don't want to save anything that I may while we were tinkering around.

9:00Under the capacity settings, let's check out my fabric capacity and then right

9:04here

9:04we see here's my fab cap capacity.

9:07This looks great out, but it is actually clickable.

9:10Give it a click and then we see capacity configurations right here.

9:14Now one of the things that I really like here is the capacity usage report.

9:18This is going to help you understand if you provision enough or too much

9:24capacity.

9:24So notice here under admin permissions, this is where you can actually set new

9:28users or

9:29contributors who can add or remove workspaces from the capacity.

9:35So you can add capacity administrators right here.

9:38You can also look at the workspaces that have been directly added to just this

9:42capacity

9:42right here.

9:44Great for capacity admins to see what all workspaces are actually using this.

9:48And we can assign workspaces to this capacity.

9:51So somebody created a workspace, but maybe didn't assign it to fabric capacity.

9:57We can move it into fabric capacity after the fact.

10:01Now some other things I want you to see are this is workspaces.

10:04This is where you can see all of the workspaces that belong to your tenant, not

10:08just your account.

10:10Very helpful for administrators to see what workspaces are currently out there.

10:15Also Azure connections is pretty interesting.

10:17This is where you can actually set default storage to actually store data via

10:22Azure Data

10:23Lake Gen 2.

10:25If you need to specify a specific storage account to do that, you can also see

10:29workspace

10:30level storage permissions, allowing workspace admins to connect their own Azure

10:35storage

10:35account to a specific workspace rather than the default tenant level storage.

10:41So pretty interesting things that you have here.

10:44Now some other things that will help you as an administrator out.

10:47If you click on workspaces, you'll see admin monitoring right here.

10:51Give that a click and it may take a second or two to create your admin

10:55monitoring views

10:56and workspaces and dashboards for the first time.

11:00See it says we're adding new content and we'll notify you when it is ready.

11:04So take a look at this.

11:06After a minute or two, we see a couple of reports get generated.

11:09There's the purview hub largely used for data discovery, identifying things or

11:13automatically

11:14detecting things like security or sensitive data.

11:18Now we don't have anything here because we don't really have any data here just

11:22yet,

11:22but we see a sensitivity page.

11:24We see an items page.

11:27This is where we see things like what are endorsed or certified or promoted

11:31items are.

11:32We can see an inventory report from purview and ultimately overall an overview

11:37report.

11:37That's pretty cool too jumping back here again into the admin monitoring

11:42section.

11:43I'll grab the feature usage and adoption report.

11:47And again, not particularly compelling yet because we don't really have any

11:51data or workspaces

11:52yet, but it's going to be there.

11:54This is going to get populated over time and we'll see things like the number

11:58of active

11:59users we have, the active capacities that we have, the active workspaces that

12:04we have,

12:05and the capacity usage over time, the types of operations that we're doing over

12:11time.

12:12It's going to be really useful data for an administrator.

12:16So with that being said, we now have an idea of what it's like to be an

12:19administrator,

12:20where are you going to be poking around the most.

12:23Largely it's going to be in the admin settings as well as probably checking in

12:28on your reports

12:29to look at usage and sensitivity.

0:00Now we're going to talk a little bit about the ways that you can automate the

0:03way that

0:04you work with Power BI.

0:06Power BI at the end of the day is a service.

0:10And like everything in Microsoft, it's all accessible via APIs.

0:16Put another way, the way that you administer or work with Power BI can be

0:21automated with

0:22scripting languages like PowerShell or really anything that can leverage an SDK

0:29, software

0:29development kit.

0:30Now there's an okay chance that people going for the DP600 certification exam

0:35don't have

0:36a lot of software development experience.

0:39Maybe they haven't worked with PowerShell before or Python or .NET or

0:43JavaScript.

0:44First of all, CBT Nuggets has training on all of those things.

0:48Second of all, I'll say that learning PowerShell and Python were maybe the two

0:53most important

0:54and powerful things I ever learned in my career.

0:57And I highly recommend you take the few weeks to learn it.

1:02One of my favorite books is called Automate the Boring Stuff.

1:05And it really does live up to the name.

1:08PowerShell and Python are how you do that.

1:12Script away the boring automated work.

1:15Now when we want to interact with Power BI using PowerShell, we can actually

1:19use Commandlets,

1:21basically specialized commands built specifically for working with PowerShell.

1:26Now this documentation is a little bit out of date.

1:29If you scroll up here, the last time it was updated was 2021.

1:33Well, here we are today in 2024.

1:36The documentation says this still only works with Windows PowerShell on the

1:41traditional

1:42.NET framework or PowerShell core version six.

1:46The truth is it actually works just fine with PowerShell seven and .NET, not

1:52Windows.NET

1:53framework or .NET core, but actual true open source .NET.

1:57I'm on a Mac book right now and I'm going to open PowerShell version seven.

2:02So here we go, PowerShell version seven point three point one right here on the

2:06screen.

2:07If I want to use this command to install the PowerShell commands, we can do

2:11that right

2:12here.

2:13We can install module, the name of name, Microsoft Power BI management, Mgmt.

2:24If I press enter here, it'll go through the process of installing it.

2:27Now when you type this, it may prompt you, do you agree to download and install

2:32this?

2:32You can type A and then press enter.

2:34I've already installed it in my environment because I used this.

2:38So there we go.

2:39It's already given me the next prompt saying we already installed it.

2:44So to test it out, the first thing you want to do is you actually want to get

2:48logged in

2:49to the Power BI service.

2:51So as the command says right there on the screen, we're going to do connect

2:55Power BI service

2:56account.

2:57I'll press enter and what this does is it does a device log in authentication

3:02flow.

3:02It tells you bring up this page right here, microsoft.com/device log in.

3:09So I'll bring it up right here.

3:13It'll ask me for the code that was generated in the terminal.

3:16So I'll grab this code right here.

3:20That tells it what device is trying to log in, aka my terminal.

3:24And then I tell it what account to use to authenticate this connection.

3:27So we're saying are you trying to connect with Power BI PowerShell?

3:30I say yes, and it says you've now signed in to Power BI PowerShell application.

3:35When I bring it back up here, sure enough, I do see some warnings.

3:38That's fine.

3:39This is some backport and compatibility with it trying to talk to old.net core

3:45connections,

3:45but it'll still work.

3:47We're now logged in to Power BI.

3:49We can see the exact tenant ID and the account right there.

3:53So being that I'm an administrator, I might want to look at all of the Power BI

3:58workspaces

3:59that exist underneath my organization.

4:02I can copy this commandlet, bring it up right here, press it in and run and

4:06check this out.

4:08Now I can see all of these different Power BI workspaces that exist in my

4:14organization.

4:15And I can work with them in an automatic way.

4:18We can see things like who the users are, who the access rights, what their

4:22access rights

4:23are, like who the administrators are.

4:25We can figure out if a workspace has become read only or if it's orphaned or if

4:31it's

4:31even deactivated.

4:33Interestingly, we can also change a workspace as well, like updating the name

4:39or description

4:41of a user's workspace.

4:43This uses the set Power BI workspace commandlet.

4:47We can also add users to a workspace.

4:49Think about the use case for this.

4:51If some new employee gets hired to the analytics team, we could automate their

4:56onboarding and

4:57assignments to given workspaces based on their security group permissions.

5:01Or whenever they leave the organization, we could remove a user from the

5:06workspace.

5:07Feel free to scroll through this page and take a look at the Power BI

5:11PowerShell commandlets

5:13that exist here.

5:14It's very unlikely that you'll see these commandlets on a certification exam

5:20environment.

5:20But nonetheless, you should know that they exist and understand at a very basic

5:26level

5:26what are the types of things that you can do with Power BI commandlets.

5:31Now behind the scenes, these commandlets are really just interacting with those

5:35Power BI

5:36REST APIs, those API endpoints.

5:39Again, understanding the actual API endpoints and how to interact with them and

5:44write code

5:45to interact with them.

5:46I feel strongly that you're unlikely to see that on an exam environment, but

5:50just for

5:51your reference, you should know that it exists.

5:54So I've linked the documentation right here, like the REST API documentation,

5:58that you

5:59could start to understand what are the types of things that you could do

6:02programmatically

6:03with code.

6:04This is really useful for automating setup stuff or deprovisioning operations

6:11or anything

6:12that you do regularly that also feels monotonous and repeatable.

6:17So this has just been getting to know the lay of the land.

6:21That's really what we were focused in on in this skill was just understanding

6:25where do

6:26you even go and what do you even click on to begin as an administrator of a

6:31Microsoft

6:31Fabric environment.

6:33I hope this has been informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00So here we are in our challenge section. We are now exploring

0:03Fabric for our environment because Microsoft makes charity pricing very

0:09beneficial

0:10It's something that is attractive to us that we want to explore

0:14But we need to understand the administrative detail some of the burdens that we

0:18'll have as an administrator up front to make sure

0:21This is going to be worth it immediately out of the gate is licensing and cost

0:26now with less than

0:28150 users in our company

0:30We could actually get more beneficial pricing by using power BI premium per

0:36user

0:37Rather than dedicated capacity the premium BI capacity p4 license was like the

0:43very top of the range

0:44And that's going to be looking at well into the five digits per month

0:48Depending on of course, what maybe the charity discounts look like but still

0:52premium per user is going to be a

0:56beneficial item there coupled that with a lower tier fabric capacity as long as

1:01it's enough capacity to meet our

1:03Workload needs which it should be with minimal number of users

1:07Then we would actually be able to unlock all of the features available there

1:12rather than the highest tier fabric

1:15Which still doesn't give us access to the power BI features now true or false

1:19with the power BI administrator role

1:21You will not be able to stop users from sharing data to external sources or the

1:26internet well

1:27That's obviously false

1:28That's kind of one of the big things about being a power BI administrator is

1:32controlling who gets to access what data and where?

1:36That's the really the big takeaway that we wanted to get from understanding

1:40that administrator page where all of the buttons and options were

1:45It was kind of overwhelming the number of options that you have to configure

1:49And we'll start digging into that a little bit more when the time comes now

1:53What tool could you use to automate assigning a new employee a license and

1:58giving them rights to a specific workspace?

2:00so we're thinking power BI right here and

2:03When a new employee gets hired we know they're going to need some sort of

2:08access into power BI whether that might be a

2:11Reader role or permission or maybe they're actually going to be a developer

2:15Or an ETL engineer or something like that. We want to automate all of their

2:20permissions assignments now

2:22PowerShell is my go-to for that particular task and this doesn't extend beyond

2:29power BI mind you

2:31This could be all of their permissions could be onboarded and automated

2:35depending on what type of maybe department

2:37They were hired into we could grant them their active directory permissions or

2:41so the admin portal definitely could help us do this

2:44But it wouldn't be an automated fashion and be a point-and-click operation

2:48You cannot automate this well we can automate anything

2:51There's a rest API and Microsoft 365 command line tools was beyond the scope of

2:56this course beyond that

2:58It's not something that we would be able to automate very seamlessly the way we

3:02could a PowerShell script

3:04So the best answer here is PowerShell we will submit there and we now have

3:09tackled our challenge