It has been quiet for a few weeks due to summer break. But now, it’s time to ramp up again and continue posting about Fabric. This time, I’ll start with a question that many Fabric (and Power BI) users ask themselves: “What does my tenant configuration look like?”. Often, users find themselves eager to explore new features they’ve come across online. But somehow, they cannot get it to work, or the feature does not even show for them.

In this blog, I’ll elaborate on the challenges and scenarios in which questions like these come up, and what you can do as a Fabric / Power BI administrator to ease answering this question.

The challenge

In the world of Fabric (and Power BI), users are often experimenting with platform features that are newly released or somehow came to their attention. Usually, they want to try out these features, without fully understanding them or taking into account the possible consequences. For example, to make use of some features data might leave the geographical region, which might not align with organizational governance and security protocols.

Tenant administrators are often the ones to blame in this scenario. Cause users might share a feeling of feeling restricted by their administrators, while the administrators did their best to strike a balance between enabling user innovation and adhering to the organizational and legal standards. Consequently, some features may be blocked or restricted by a security group to certain users for a secure and compliant tenant configuration.

I also recommend reading my earlier post:
A Day in the Life of a Fabric Administrator: Balancing Governance and Collaboration.

When users try to use certain features that are blocked for them, they get a notification saying that they have to reach out to their tenant administrator. The first challenge they will encounter is figuring out who their tenant administrator is, as that is often not known by many. When they got to know their tenant administrator, the admins have to explain themselves many times on the why of disabling or limiting certain features.

Addressing user questions

To address the recurrent questions from users about the tenant settings, or even asking whether they can get tenant administrator permissions to change settings (to which the answer is obviously: No!), there is a solution! Ideally, users can look-up independently what their tenant configuration is like.

Of course, communication is key! As administrator you can put a lot of time and effort in writing a wiki and detailing out every single tenant setting and the configuration applicable to their organization. But since Fabric evolves rapidly, this task is never finished. Therefore, it might make more sense to have generic documentation about security standards and policies applicable. An easy way to share what this means for the tenant configuration and what setting is enabled, limited or disabled will help.

Luckily there is an approach that will make this possible. With the launch of Fabric, a new Admin REST API has been introduced. The page is well hidden and still limited, but there is a REST API that returns the tenant settings including potential limitations to security groups that might apply.

GET https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/v1/admin/tenantsettings

How?

How could you easily share these insights across your organization? I would suggest leveraging the same platform as we’re talking about. Collect the API response in a dataflow for example, build a simple dataset and report on top and distribute as Power BI App across the organization. With a daily refresh, new tenant settings will automatically show up and for the administrators convenience you can enable a simple notification when new tenant settings appear in the API response.

To conclude

Of course, there are many alternative approaches to consider for collecting and sharing the tenant configuration. All of the above just acts as an (working) example that helps you to get started. But let agree that the key advantages of sharing the tenant settings within the organization contribute to:

• Empowering users to independently assess feature availability based on their tenant configuration.
• Reducing administrative loads by establishing a reduction in number of questions received about the tenant configuration.

Let’s hope for more Fabric Admin APIs to get added to this library!