Changes to Fabric Tenant Settings for API's

If you are a Fabric Administrator, either for your own tenant / company or for customers, you might get the weekly emails from Microsoft 365 Message center. I've mentioned this briefly in an earlier post about Changes to default values for a tenant setting for SQL Database.

I advice you to at least have a look through that weekly email and check for any Fabric or Power BI updates. An example update you can get is like the below. This screenshot is actually from the Message Center itself, not from the email.

The problem with the M365 Message Center is that only people with privileged roles can access it. And not all updates shown there are communicated in other ways by Microsoft. Sometimes they write a blog post, like this one: Cognitive services and Azure ML will be fully retired, sometimes there's a specific info message in Fabric, or there might be a new tag in the tenant settings, but more often you don't see any other communications around the topic.

So if you are not a Fabric Admin, you probably haven't seen the message I want to inform you about today, so that's why I'm writing this post!

Call To Action

TL;DR

Two new admin toggles are live in the Fabric Tenant Settings, under Developer settings. Check your Tenant Settings and see how they relate to your policies and governance!

Action Required on API Access Setting Split

Microsoft Fabric is changing how service principal access to public APIs is controlled. The existing all-or-nothing tenant setting was split into two separate settings — giving us admins more granular control, but also introducing a change you might need to act on after August 1, 2025.

The previous setting

What Has Changed?

From mid-May to early June 2025, the previous admin setting for public API access via service principals was replaced with:

1. Service principals can create workspaces, connections, and deployment pipelines
   → Governs “global” APIs not tied to specific Fabric permissions (e.g., workspace creation).
   → Disabled by default.

2. Service principals can call Fabric public APIs
   → Governs APIs protected by the Fabric permission model (CRUD access to workspaces, folders, etc).
   → Enabled by default.

The new settings

Why This Matters

This split is a long-needed improvement: previously, disabling API access to protect core resources also blocked developers from using safe, permission-based APIs.

Now, you can lock down the high-risk parts (like workspace creation) without blocking everything else.

But: Microsoft may have enabled the second setting (permission-based API access) by default in your tenant unless you opted out.

Why should I care? You might have service principals running scripts to create workspaces, deploy certain items or manage workspace objects for example.

What You Should Do Now

• Check your Fabric admin portal for the two new settings under Developer Settings

• Before August 1, 2025, you could've shown a checkbox labeled "Accept Microsoft’s change to enable...", and you want to keep permission-based API access disabled, uncheck the box and hit Apply

• Check the values of both settings

Timeline Recap

• May–June 2025: Settings split rolls out

• July 31, 2025: Last day to opt out of automatic enablement

• August 1, 2025: Microsoft finalizes the transition

Conclusion

In case you are running a monitoring solution that keeps a history of Tenant Settings, for example FUAM, you can check the Tenant Settings history and see when the change became active in your tenant. If you don't have such a monitoring solution, I highly recommend checking FUAM out. You can get started with setup and deployment of the solution with a few hours of work.

I spotted this setting shift on telemetry around June 1 in my tenant:

There were some changes in how tenant settings can control access for Service Principals to API's. Make sure to check your settings and adjust them accordingly.

If you want to read more info on the exact workings of the tenant settings, have a look at the Tenant Settings documentation.

Did you already notice these changes and take action?

Let me know in the comments.

There's No Free Lunch - (Billing of) Preview Features in Fabric

Another post on my favorite topic: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

I decided to leave "Governance & Administration" out of the titles of my blog posts from now on.
The titles were getting a bit lengthy, just because I wanted to include the focus on Governance & Administration. I am already using labels which you can use for that: Governance, Administration, etc..

Today, let's talk about preview features in Fabric!

Preview features

First of all, when using Preview features in Fabric, you should be aware of the small print.

Next, we all know, there's no such thing as a free lunch, right?

Because: preview does not mean free! Let me explain.

Two of those preview features - SQL Database and Workspace Monitoring - have recently moved to a charging model as Fabric develops further. It's essential to understand these adjustments if you want to maximize your resources, govern your capacity and efficiently control expenses.

Fabric SQL Database

I wrote about it earlier when they were about to change the tenant setting for SQL Database: you should be aware that billing for SQL Database already started.

Compute and data storage for SQL databases are now charged according to your Fabric capacity beginning of February 1, 2025. The start date of backup billing is April 1, 2025. You can only pay for the resources you use because compute charges only apply when you are actively using the service. Automatic backups and storage are priced individually each month. Check Microsoft Learn for more details on billing and utilization reporting.

If you check the doc's on the usage of SQL Database you can see that:

1 Fabric capacity unit corresponds to 0.383 Database vCores, or, 1 Database vCore corresponds to 2.611 Fabric capacity unit.

For example, a Fabric capacity SKU F64 has 64 capacity units, which is equivalent to 24.512 SQL database vCores.

Compute is billed by the minute, but the database is also kept alive for 15 minutes afterwards. So if you use it for 4 minutes, you are actually billed for 19 minutes!
Storage will be billed per hour, regardless of usage.

Workspace Monitoring

Workspace Monitoring gathers and arranges logs and metrics from different Fabric components by building an Eventhouse database inside your workspace, providing insightful data about workspace performance and usage.
You can use this tool to optimize queries, minimize data downtime, investigate mistakes, and fix performance concerns.

As of February 2025, Workspace Monitoring billing has begun. Make sure you have a Power BI Premium or Fabric capacity and that the required tenant settings are set up in order to enable monitoring in your workspace. Check Microsoft Learn for a detailed tutorial on how to enable and use Workspace Monitoring.

Check your usage after this changeover

It is crucial to examine your present and anticipated consumption in order to foresee any expenses now that invoicing for these functions has been activated. To keep an eye on capacity utilization across all workloads and make sure it fits your organization's demands and budget, use the Fabric Capacity Metrics app. 

See Fabric capacity billing guidelines for a more thorough explanation of how these modifications affect your Azure bill.

Are you using these preview features in your tenant?

And did you know they are already billed?

Let me know in the comments!

Microsoft Fabric Documentation (for Admins)

Maybe this topic is not the most sexiest of them all, but it certainly has the same (or maybe even more) amount of value for YOU!
And.. another post on my favorite topic: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

Earlier I wrote about the default domain settings, changes to the default tenant setting value for SQL database and I also covered the (rights of the) Fabric Adminsitrator role. Today I want to talk about a more meta-topic: existing documentation on Microsoft Learn, and of course specifically for Admins.

Microsoft Fabric documentation

By this point, I assume you've read this far (and perhaps a few other posts as well), I guess you've heard of Microsoft Learn. 😁 

If not, go there now: Microsoft Fabric documentation!

It is full of so much good content, to name a few:

• Overview 
• What is Fabric: The B.A.S.I.C.S.
• Security in Fabric: You might not be aware, but there's so many things you can do to tweak and adjust security for your organization!
• Concepts 
• Choose a Fabric data store: Choose between a Lakehouse, Warehouse, Eventhouse, or SQL Database
• Copilot in Fabric: In what workloads can you use Copilot and what are the prereqs?
• Capacity and license types: This explains concepts like a tenant, capacity, workspace, SKU's, Power BI licenses, etc.
• Tutorials
• Use taskflows to build solutions: I'm curious, who really uses these in their environment?
• End-to-end tutorials: Those tutorials where the corner-stone of getting started with Fabric after it was announced. They still provide enourmous value, although sometimes the steps can be very basic.

And there's so much more:

Ok, I know... Sometimes the documentation is, let's say, a bit behind the latest features in Fabric, right?

It may be outdated, there might be typo's, it might even be wrong in some points.

Instead of (only) complaining, you should do something about it! 😏

Did you know you can edit those pages (make sure you're logged in to your MS Learn account):

After clicking that pencil on a doc page, you end up at GitHub where you can make changes to the document. You do need a GitHub account, know how to fork the repo and create a Pull Request when you're done (if you don't know how to, read this tutorial on GitHub 101).

Microsoft Fabric documentation for admins

Now on to my favorite part: the Admin stuff! 😁

Go to Microsoft Fabric documentation for admins to learn all about admin settings, tools, the admin portal, admin roles, and monitoring and management to name a few.

What is the admin monitoring workspace

The admin monitoring workspace is a specialized environment designed for Fabric administrators to monitor and manage workloads, usage, and governance within their tenant. Using the resources available within the workspace, admins can perform tasks such as security audits, performance monitoring, capacity management, and more.

It recently got a revamp on the design side and now looks way better.

The information contained in the report is on a fairly basic level, but you can still get some good insights out of it.

Next to that, you can also connect to the semantic model and extend it.

Closing

As you see there is a lot of information available on Microsoft Learn.`

Do you think the documentation on Microsoft Learn is valuable? Have you used it?

Does it need improvement? If yes, on what points?

Let me know in the comments!

Changes to the Default Tenant Setting value for SQL Database

Another post on my favorite topic: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

I decided to leave "Governance & Administration" out of the titles of my blog posts from now on.
The titles were getting a bit lengthy, just because I wanted to include the focus on Governance & Administration. I am already using labels which you can use for that: Governance, Administration, etc..

UPDATE 2025-03-12:

Microsoft released an update on the rollout of the changes to this setting. The actual enablement is postponed for 20 days to March 28. The timelines mentioned in the blog below are now:

• February 28, 2025 - Checkbox notification rolled out globally.
• March 8, 2025 -  Infobox will display this as the enablement date.
• March 28, 2025 - Actual enablement date for tenants that take no action.

Extending flexibility: default checkbox changes on tenant settings for SQL database in Fabric

Microsoft 365 Message Center

In case you have access to the M365 Admin Center, or more specific the M365 Message Center, you might have seen this message. I reckon not many people did.. That's why I'm blogging about it here 😁

I'm specifically talking about this message in the Message Center, being a major update and with admin impact: 

Communications on default checkbox changes on tenant settings and billing start for SQL database in Fabric.

Changes to SQL Database Tenant Setting

Recently, there's been a change to the tenant setting for SQL Database, but only in case you haven't changed the setting before.. 😉

Below is the setting in my own tenant, where the setting is still disabled, which was and still is the default option (hint: this is about to change!).

So if I do nothing, then after March 8, the default value will change to ON, or Enabled for the entire organization.

If I decide to opt out before March 8, so if I uncheck the checkbox Accept Microsoft's default selection (Off for the entire organization), this tenant setting will stay disabled, also after March 8.

To be clear, as I mentioned, you only see this message if you haven't changed the default setting (off).

In the Powerdobs tenant we already enabled SQL Database, so I only see the below:

M365 Message Center for Non-Admins

In case you don't have access to the Message Center, I found another site, called the Microsoft 365 Message Center Archive, where all those messages are replicated, set up by Merill Fernando, Principal Product Manager for Microsoft Entra.

Direct link to the message: https://mc.merill.net/message/MC996579.

I have been searching for a (regular) blog post on this topic, but I haven't seen anything:
Multiple other blog posts were written on the Fabric blog, but none of them explicitly mentioned any of this:

• Feb 12: Govern your data in SQL database in Microsoft Fabric with protection policies in Microsoft Purview
  
• Feb 19: Enhancing SQL database in Fabric: share your feedback and shape the future
  
• Feb 26: Why SQL database in Fabric is the best choice for low-code/no-code Developers
• There's a little link to Billing and utilization reporting for SQL database hidden in this blog post, which explains billing started at February 1st, but no mention of the tenant setting

Billing for SQL Database (preview)

Last thing I want to explicitly call out in accordance with the changed tenant setting:

While SQL Database in Fabric is still in preview, billing already started at February 1. Furthermore, billing for backup starts after April 1.

So when the setting is changed to ON, and you don't run a trial, you can start seeing SQLDbNative on your Capacity Metrics App as explained here. 😉

Governance & Administration - Default Domain settings

I'm picking up my favorite topic again: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

Last week I wrote about the rights of the Fabric Administrator.

Today I want to make you aware of a default value of the domain settings inside Fabric.

This default value might not be the best value for you.. 😉

Domains in Fabric

A short introduction to Domains: they are essentially a way of managing and structuring your data across the organization. You can logically group together data in workspaces. A logical grouping can be business units, areas, fields, solutions or actually whatever works for you. It shouldn't be something a Fabric Admin decides on his own. Ideally business and / or enterprise architects with the data owners (if any 😐) should implement the design of domains, subdomains and owners. People from you Center of Excellence (again: if available..) would be a good fit to include in this discussion.

In case you need some help or guidance on how to set up your domains, there's a nice article that can help you get started: Best practices for planning and creating domains.

Default Domain Settings

Check your defaults! I've said it multiple times, always check default settings in your tenant, be it in the tenant settings or the domain settings.

When you create a domain (either with or without adding a domain admin explicitly), you end up with the default settings applied to that domain. Let's check what that involves.

After creating your domain and navigating to the settings you can SHOULD set the Contributors of the domain.

By default, it is set to The entire organization. I would limit it to either of the other options. Preferably tenant and domain admins, but if you have a group of people from Finance that you want to allow to add workspaces to the Finance domain, I'm happy with that too. Just don't use the default setting 😀

Luckily there's one more caveat to this that restricts it to hopefully a sligthly smaller group: the documentation points out you also have to be a workspace admin to be able to use this feature, so that limits it to people that have an admin role in the workspace.

One more reason to not give everyone the admin role in your workspace by default!

Next to that, you can also audit for these changes by checking the audit log for Fabric, specifically the UpdateDataDomainFoldersRelationsAsAdmin operation, which gives you the activities when someone assigns (or unassigns) a workspace to/from a domain.

Conclusion

Domains give you a good option to manage and group the content in your organization.

Just be aware of the default settings when you create one. Set the contributors to the tenant and domain admins, or a security group, just don't use the default!

Let me know what you think, have you seen this default setting and more importantly, did you change it in any of your domains?

Governance & Administration - Fabric Administrator Role

It's been a while since I've written on a regular cadance, so I'm picking up my favorite topic again: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

Today I want to talk to you about the Fabric Administrator (role).

• What rights does an Admin have?
• Are there more people that also have these rights? (Hint: YES! 😉)

Toady, I'm not talking about the governance aspects of the Admin, the Tenant settings or the Admin portal in general. I'll leave that for a next time. Or read other posts, for example by Marc on other roles and controls in Fabric or the delicate balance of governance and collaboration.

Manage Fabric Administrators

Users with this role can manage everything in Fabric, so from the Admin portal, to workspace access, and have also read access to various other parts in the Office and Azure ecosystem.

I encourage you to check who are assigned this role, because it should only be a handful of people in my opinion. You can check this in the Azure portal, under Entra ID > Roles and administrators.

Alternatively you can also search for it in the top search bar and go there directly.

Looking at the description of the role, we can see a few interesting things:

(As an Admin,) You can go to Azure and O365 Service Health to check for potential status issues with those services. You can also check and file (Premium) support tickets, depending on the license/capacity you have.

I especially want to call out the last row in the permissions:

The link there reads: microsoft.powerApps.powerBi/....

Power Platform Administrator

Now let's take a look at the Power Platform Admnistrator role description:

You might have noticed the same path there: microsoft.powerApps.

So this means, everything "below" PowerApps is also accessible, so the Power Platform Admin can also access and manage the same things the Fabric Admin can!

I also encourage you to check the people assigned to this role 😀

Just In Time Access Roles

Depending on your organizational settings, Privileged Identity Management might be enabled.
This means that people might need to activate the Fabric Admin role (for a period of time) before it becomes active. In the below screenshot you can see that Ernst and me have the role permanently assigned for Powerdobs.

But if I'm working as a consultant it usually is on a need-to-have bases, so I can e.g. activate it for 1, 2 or 8 hours. 

Looking at the picture above, you can see that there's Active and Eligible assignments. Depending on the settings and activity, people might have the PIM-role, but not activated at the moment.

Wrap up

To complete the list of access to Fabric, the Global (tenant) Admin role also has access to everything in Fabric:

• Global Admin
• Power Platform Administrator
• Fabric Administrator

People with the above roles have the same rights as the Fabric Admin.

Did you know the Power Platform Administrator has those rights?

Do you think I missed any information in this blog?

Please let me know in the comments below.

Governance & Administration - Ownership Takeover for Fabric Items

It's been a while since I've written on a regular cadance, so I'm picking up my favorite topic again: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

Today I want to quickly show a new feature that was just introduced, but long awaited for!

Ownership takeover for Fabric items!

Yes, you read it right, you can now TAKE OVER OWNERSHIP in Fabric! 😁

In a workspace, go to the ellipsis of the item (the 3 dots), and go to settings.

In the settings of the item you can see the Take over button:

Clicking that will show a pop-up and will start the transfer of ownership.

After a few seconds (that was my experience for the handful items I tried) you will get the notification it succeeded.

After that the (Take over) button has disappeared and will show up for the original (and other) users.

A few things to be aware of:

• You need read and write permissions to the item you want to take over
• That means a Contributor or higher role in the workspace
• Depending on the item you transfer, you might need to set up/refresh credentials for connections, as explained here
• The old way of taking ownership of Power BI items will still remain the same
• Mirrored databases are not supported (yet)
• If you're taking over a pipeline that execute's other items (like a notebook), you have to take over ownership of that item separately

For more info check the MS Learn docs: Take ownership of Fabric items.

Wrap up

This is of course especially helpful when the creator of an item left the company or that account is locked for whatever reason.

What's next you ask? The API for takeover is not yet available, and you also can't switch to a Service Principal yet. It only switches ownership to the current user at this moment.

Have you tried this feature yet?

Let me know what you think!

My DataGrillen Adventure: Speaking, Connecting, and New Friendships

I just got back from an incredible trip to DataGrillen, and I can’t wait to share my experiences with you. If you haven’t heard of it, DataGrillen is this amazing community-driven conference in Germany, where data professionals from around the world gather to share knowledge, ideas, and, of course, some good BBQ and beers. This year was special for me because I had the honor of speaking again at the event.

A special thanks goes out to Ben (@bweissman) & William (@sql_williamd) for organizing the event! But let's start from the beginning.

The Journey Begins

The anticipation was building as I packed up the car, later picked up Eduard Koekkoek (@heartforarts) and set off on our road trip to Germany. Eduard, a great friend and fellow data enthusiast, was the perfect companion for the journey. We spent some time on the road discussing everything from the latest in data technologies to our expectations for the conference. The drive was quite long, but the conversation made it fly by.

Stepping onto the Stage

The highlight of my trip was undoubtedly my speaking session. I had the first session at the first day, just after the opening "ceremony". The preparation that goes into a talk is always intense, but the passion I have for the subject kept me going. The topic was close to my heart, Administration and Governance in Fabric, and I was thrilled to see a room of fellow data enthusiasts ready to dive into the discussion. 

The audience was incredibly receptive, and the interaction was great. There’s something deeply fulfilling about sharing knowledge and seeing that spark of understanding and curiosity in others. The Q&A session that followed was lively, with thoughtful questions. It’s moments like these that remind me why I really like what I do.

Reconnecting with Old Friends

One of the best parts of conferences is the chance to reconnect with friends and colleagues from the industry. DataGrillen was no exception. With the change of forgetting someone, I won't call out names here 😀
It was like a reunion of sorts, seeing familiar faces, catching up on the latest in our professional and personal lives, and talking about past conferences and projects. There’s a special bond that forms when you share experiences and challenges over the years, and DataGrillen provided the perfect backdrop for these reunions.

A smaller group of people, specifically people into running, like to get together for an early run on days of a conference. We created a very special, long-running thread on Twitter (a.k.a. X), that actually started 2 years ago at DataGrillen!

Ran a little bit more 😊🥵 pic.twitter.com/dWM8mNwwo4

— Koen Verbeeck 🇺🇦 🌈 (@Ko_Ver) May 17, 2024

Furthermore, we exchanged ideas over beers and BBQ, debated the future of data technologies, and shared a lot of laughs. These moments are invaluable, and they remind me of the strength and warmth of the data community. It's not just about the work we do, but the friendships we forge along the way.

Making New Connections

While reconnecting with old friends was wonderful, making new ones was equally exhilarating. DataGrillen attracted a diverse crowd of professionals, each bringing unique perspectives and experiences. I met so many passionate individuals, each conversation was a learning opportunity, and a chance to see the data world through a different lens.

The DataGrillen Vibe

What sets DataGrillen apart is its atmosphere. The organizers have created an environment that fosters learning and networking in the most enjoyable way possible. The BBQ element adds a fun twist, making the conference feel more like a community gathering than a formal event. It’s the perfect balance of professional development and relaxation.

Looking Ahead

As Eduard and I drove back home, I felt a great sense of satisfaction and inspiration. DataGrillen was more than just a conference: it was a reminder of the incredible community we’re all part of. I left with new knowledge, strengthened friendships, and a bunch of new connections that I’m excited to nurture.

If you ever get the chance to attend DataGrillen, don’t hesitate. It’s an experience that goes beyond the sessions and keynotes – it’s about the people, the conversations, and the community. I’m already looking forward to next year’s event!

Session materials

My slides were already shared with the conference, but in case you haven't found them, you can find them at my GitHub.
I've also uploaded the template file I used in my demo for Admin Monitoring to the above page.

First page of my demo file

You can also find slides of previous conferences there. I generally follow this pattern: https://github.com/NickyvVr/talks/tree/master/slides/YYYY/yyyymmdd [Conference name]

Until next time, keep learning, keep sharing, and keep grilling!

Governance & Administration - Tenant Settings: Searching

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

You can find other posts in the series here:

• Fabric (Tenant Settings) API's
• Tenant settings: Visual Cues

Governance & Administration - Tenant Settings: Visual Cues

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

You can find other posts in the series here:

• Fabric (Tenant Settings) API's
• Tenant Settings: Searching
  

Pausing a Fabric Capacity - What Does It Actually Mean?

After an initial question by my friend and fellow MVP Koen Verbeeck, myself and a bunch of people started answering, amongst others was Mohammad Ali, Group Program Manager for Power BI.

If a #MicrosoftFabric capacity is not running, you cannot use the #PowerBI reports? cc @BenniDeJagere @cwebb_bi

— Koen Verbeeck 🇺🇦 🌈 (@Ko_Ver) September 27, 2023

After a while it got me thinking:

• What does it actually mean when I pause a Fabric capacity?
• What will stop working?
• What can I still do and won't stop working?

Important considerations

Microsoft Fabric is a prerelease online service that is currently in public preview and may be substantially modified before it's released. Preview online service products and features aren't complete but are made available on a preview basis so that customers can get early access and provide feedback.

A note before you start and might be aware of, Microsoft Fabric is still in preview, so be aware of the available functionality, availability and supportability, which is described in detail here.

TL;DR

After playing around and testing various scenario's, I was quite surprised on a few answers I got, so keep reading if you want to find out!

In case you are not interested in the setup, you can also skip right to my tests or the conclusions.

Start setup

The steps I took to start exploring the capacity capabilities are the following:

• I created a Fabric capacity in the Azure Portal for my tenant. You can even start an Azure (30 day) free trial and use that to create a Fabric capacity. Erwin did a great job explaing how to create a Fabric capacity, so I won't go into details here.
• Then I set up a basic Lakehouse from the Lakehouse tutorial on Microsoft Learn. I followed the tutorial up untill step 3 (Build a lakehouse), where I end up with a dataflow Gen2, a lakehouse and a Power BI (Direct Lake) report on the default dataset.
• I also created 2 workspaces:
  
  

• Test Fabric Capacity holds all my Fabric artifacts items and has the Fabric capacity (nickyscapacity, see below) assigned. This is the workspace I used for my tutorial. Let's call this the Fabric workspace.
• Test Fabric semantic model has no capacity assigned, so it's a regular (pro) workspace. Let's call this workspace.
• After that, I've created a few datasets/reports (or semantic models if you will 😀) (with Direct Lake, DirectQuery and Import) on top of the SQL Endpoint of my lakehouse.

The basic report I created, it's not really important how it looks for now:

My tests

The first thing is of course pausing my capacity, which is an easy push of a button in the Azure portal.

Next I want to see what happens when I access certain items or take certain actions in my workspaces.

Here's a list of things I tried to do:

• Access dataflow Gen2
• Access the Lakehouse
• Access SQL Endpoint (of the Lakehouse)
• Access Direct Lake model from Fabric workspace
• Access Direct Lake model from workspace
• Access DQ model from Fabric workspace
• Access DQ dataset from workspace
• Access Import dataset from Fabric workspace
• Access Import dataset from workspace
• Download import dataset and re-publish to workspace
• Refresh Import dataset from workspace
• Move the Fabric workspace to Pro
• Access the Fabric Capacity Metrics app
• Edit capacity settings

Access my dataflow Gen2

Not a very helpful error message 😀

Access the Lakehouse

This is very helpful, it actually mentions my capacity (ID) is not running.

Access SQL Endpoint (of the Lakehouse)

Not very helpful, it doesn't say anything about my capacity.

Access Direct Lake model from Fabric workspace

This one IS helpful, it actually mentions my capacity is not active, although it doesn't give the ID like with accessing the lakehouse.

Access Direct Lake model from workspace

I created a copy of the report into the regular workspace and opened the report.

Strange enough, I suspect because of some caching that was already done before pausing the capacity, some parts of the report still work. I assume that cache is then copied over (with the report) to the regular workspace.

Some interactions worked, but when I clicked a filter without any cache, I got the same error message as below with the DQ model.

Access DQ model from Fabric workspace

The visual itself gives me the above error, see the detailed error message below: not very helpful.

Access DQ dataset from workspace

This one is a bit inconsistent because I got different errors on this action.

I'm accessing the DQ report in the other, regular workspace. I'm getting a slightly different error in the visual, but the detailed error message is totally different then from the Fabric workspace. It's more a SQL server error message.

It at least tells me there's something wrong with the SQL endpoint.

But when I tried this same action later, I got the following error, which is very much helpful because it mentions the CapacityNotActive.

Access Import dataset from Fabric workspace

The error itself is helpful, because it mentions the capacity.

However, this one got me a bit surprised, because I'm accessing an imported model, so the data is no longer in OneLake. But as we'll see a bit further, nothing from a Fabric workspace can be accessed anymore when the capacity is paused.

Access Import dataset from workspace ✅

The difference with the action above is that this is the regular workspace. This one succeeds, because the data is in the imported model in the regular workspace, which is active and running. It has nothing to do with the Fabric capacity.

Download import dataset and re-publish to workspace ✅

Surprisingly (to me), I can still download the dataset from the Fabric workspace. So it seems the dataset itself is not stored in OneLake, since that is paused. Still a bit strange why then the import model doesn't start from this Fabric workspace.

Republishing to the (regular) workspace succeeds and gives me the report below:

Refresh Import dataset from workspace

This action pertains to refreshing the Import dataset from the regular workspace, the dataset which I could open. However, the refresh action itself fails, because it needs the lakehouse data to refresh, which is not available.

Move the Fabric workspace to Pro

When trying to move the Fabric workspace to a regular (Pro) workspace, you might be thrown off by this message in the workspace Premium settings in the bottom:

However, moving a Fabric workspace to Pro is only possible when there are no Fabric items inside:

This is also mentioned as one of the current restrictions.

I would urge you to carefully read those restrictions, the known issue(s) and final way of working when the known issue is resolved, especially if you plan to move items between regions after a workspace has been created.

Access the Fabric Capacity Metrics App ✅

The Fabric Capacity Metrics app just keeps functioning. It doesn’t need the capacity itself to operate on, it uses the analytics/telemetry from the capacity that is logged and reports on that.

Editing capacity settings

The capacity settings in the Fabric Admin portal are italic and cannot be edited, unless you resume the capacity.

Conclusion

So to conclude: all items in a Fabric workspace become unavailable (for interactive opening) when a capacity is paused. Also Power BI-only items.

You can still download an import dataset from the workspace. You can also export the .json file of a dataflow (gen 1 and gen 2). But that's about it you can do on a workspace with a paused Fabric capacity.

1: Depending on the way you created the report, it might still have some cache, so it might work partially

Thanks to Štěpán Rešl for pointing out the Usage Metrics report.

So for now, it's best to separate the two, Fabric and non-Fabric items, in separate workspaces so you can always access the Power BI only items when the capacity is paused. In case you are not running your own capacity, but a free trial capacity, you don't have to take this into account for now.

I hope this overview was usefull to you, I can at least use it as a reference and lookup post :-)

I am sure a couple of things will change in the near future, as Fabric updates keep coming out regularly.

If you are missing something from this overview let me know in the comments and I can see if I can add it here.