Frequently, I am approached by curious individuals who inquire about my job and how I contribute to the success of our customers, especially since I am not directly involved in building solutions for each and every one of them. These questions have made me realize that it might be interesting to share insights into my role as a Fabric Administrator, or as some may refer to it, a Power BI Administrator.

In this blog post, I aim to shed light on the essence of daily activities of a Fabric Administrator, the meaningful conversations people in this role engage in, and the additional value they bring to the table.

What role do you fulfill?

Recently the role of Fabric Administrator has taken over the Power BI Service Administrator. At one of my clients, I fulfill the role of Fabric Administrator. That means, that I can control all tenant settings, have access to all Fabric or Premium capacities, control workspaces and care about the governance around the data analytics platform for this organization. Obviously, I don’t do this alone – that would be impossible. I do this together with a few direct counterparts within the organization, super users and everyone else who is involved in the hybrid center of excellence (COE), where I’m the external consultant helping them to get the most out of their platform and advising on best practices and ways of working.

But serious…

So far, a lot of buzz-words – like best practices, governance, COE and super users. If you play bullshit bingo, you will probably call bingo now! Instead, let’s have a closer look at what my day-to-day job actually looks like, what kind of conversations I’m having and how I fill my day.

Often, people say that my calendar is a nightmare, though I like to have busy days as my span of concentration is very limited. That already tells a bit about what my day mostly looks like. It’s full of meetings – a lot! Besides all these meetings, there are many emails that reach my inbox. Most users know how to find us, Fabric Administrators, as we’re listed as point of contact on the central knowledge page that has been setup as part of the COE. Also, this page is linked to the Get Help button in Fabric – so users directly end up at our internal page rather than generic Microsoft Documentation.

So, my main interactions are via mail and meetings. But what do I actually work on? Let’s have a look at a few example questions and conversations that I regularly have.

Can you enable ABC for me?

At this client, we’ve setup some decent governance and implemented various controls on usage of features on the platform. That means, not everyone can do everything. So, some users will bump into warning/error messages stating that the button they clicked is blocked, or the feature they tried to use is limited by their administrator. If they want to use it – they should reach out to their admins. Very often the question that reaches my inbox is in line with:
“I tried using feature ABC, but doesn’t work. I really need this in my project, can you enable this asap, it is blocking a crucial project?”

It has been a valuable learning over the past years to stay calm and not get influenced by the urge the users try to create in their email. Cause usually nothing is on fire. I tend to always reply with a lot of questions and suggest them to plan a meeting, which directly relates to the many appointments in my calendar. Cause just asking for a feature to be enabled is not how it works.

In preparation for the meeting, I ask them to send me a solution design of the solution they’re building in which they need that feature. Some conversations already stop there, given there is no solution design and they just started somewhere. In all fairness, this is in the majority of the cases what is happening. If so, I ask them to go back and first think about the business capability they are building and what value it will be adding – after which I ask them to think about the potential technical implementations and alternatives. Some users are ignorant to this and for them it will be a hard learn and try to find all sorts of workarounds.

Alternatives to consider?

In many cases users are also not aware of alternatives they might have to reach the same goal. Part of my role is to help them to look at the same solution from a different angle, taking into account security and sensitivity of data. Let’s take a real example that I encountered recently.

A users asked me if I could enable export to images on a tenant level – while we had this disabled. The use case they had, was basically to setup a flow in Power Automate which automatically distributes screenshots of the report to all users via mail on daily bases. Despite the fact that you will be spamming their inboxes and I won’t judge any business requirement, we decided to not unlock this feature. It is for a simple reason that we made this decision and suggested to use export to PDF as alternative. It is a fact that if you apply sensitivity labels to your report, which protect the data based on policies, that these labels will be lost when you export to an image. However, if you export to PDF the labels resist while you still reach the same goal – you distributed an export at a point in time to your users.

Although, it is still possible to create a screenshot from the report manually, we aim to teach users the good practices and make the right considerations while designing and building the solutions.

Is it a reactive job?

So far, I mainly described cases in which people reach out to the Fabric administrator to ask for something. That is definitely not always the case. So, it is not a reactive job on only what comes along via mail or meetings. It is also the initial setup of the governance, staying up to date with all the latest enhancements and much more. But that is not the biggest chuck of work that exists next to incoming requests. Because it is also monitoring and taking follow-up actions. It is monitoring for odd behavior using the recently launched (in preview at time of writing) admin monitoring workspace, or any custom build solution that organizations might have.

Above you see an example of the Feature usage and Adoption report, which shows more about the activities users are taking within the Fabric Service. As Administrator, I recently reached out to a user which had over 160.000 export activities in a single month. I reached out to that user to have an open discussion. Administrators are often not the most popular folks in the organization and often are seen as the ones that don’t understand the business and only make things more complicated. Therefore, it is crucial to reach out to the users without judging them directly.

Usually, I reach out and inform them that their activities showed up in our monitor which took our attention. I ask them what the goal is they try to achieve and ask them if we can help and support them to ease the solution and simplify things. Based on that, often a call follows in which again the solution design is being discussed and alternatives considered.

In this case, there was an actual business need that needs to be fulfilled. This user built a solution to their best knowledge on his personal account, which resulted in all these activities and daily distribution of PDF documents to sales representatives. Based on the discussion we concluded that it is sub-optimal to run this process based on personal accounts, which also is a risk for continuation during vacations or when a user leaves the organization. We suggested to implement the same solution based on a service principal to have an system-to-system integration.

Wrap-up

Basically, being a Fabric Administrator covers much more than only checking some boxes in the tenant settings what people tend to think. Administrators do not only fulfill an administration role, but at the same time act as solution architects to advise to optimize solutions so capacity utilization is minimized in case premium is used and get the most out of the platform as possible. This happens in both a reactive and pro-active approach.

Daily work as administrator consists of many meetings but is also very diverse at the same time. If you ask me, the administrator should be a social person going along well with others in the organization and always aim to serve the business to the maximum reachable within the boundaries of governance, policies, security and other regulations. As administrator you should be able to clearly elaborate and communicate on the rules of the game on a level that everyone understands.

Last but not least, I want to reiterate one thing to get a misconception out of the way. Most, if not all, administrators do their utmost best and are really willing to help you. Please be kind to us, don’t judge and escalate directly if we say no to your request. Let’s have a conversation, go through the details, consider alternatives and find the best possible solution together!