The Fabric Hierarchy

1. The Fabric Hierarchy

Welcome to the Fabric Hierarchy! Understanding the structure of Fabric is crucial for effective management. We'll introduce key management terms that will be used throughout the course

2. The layers of the Fabric Pyramid

Let's start by imagining the Fabric environment as a simple pyramid. From top to bottom: At the top, we have Items and Objects - your actual content like Power BI reports, dashboards, and data warehouses. One level down is Workspaces, which are containers for your Fabric items. Every user gets a personal "My Workspace," and you can create additional workspaces for team collaboration. Next are Capacities. Think of these as pools of computational power. A Fabric capacity is your reserved set of resources that determines how much processing power you have available. At the base is your Tenant - your organization's Azure entity where everything lives. Important note: These layers aren't strictly one-to-one. A tenant can have multiple capacities (maybe one per department or for billing purposes), and each capacity usually contains many workspaces.

3. Each Fabric layer has its own admin

Let's talk about who manages what in Fabric. We'll introduce new admin roles that are different from the ones you've already explored. Each layer of our pyramid has its own administrator with specific permissions that flow upward: Tenant Admins control everything - from tenant settings down to individual items. They set up the tenant, create capacities, and enable global features such as preview add-ons like Copilot for Fabric.

4. Each Fabric layer has its own admin

Capacity Admins have control over their capacity layer, focusing primarily on managing computational resources and space.

5. Each Fabric layer has its own admin

Finally, Workspace Admins manage only within their workspace scope. You've already encountered these in the previous chapter - they are users with the "Admin" role in the workspace "Manage Access" panel.

6. Your work toolbox: the Fabric Portal

Finally, let's talk about managing your Fabric environment. The Fabric Admin Portal is your control center for everything, from tenant settings at the top of our pyramid to individual workspaces. Here, you can handle global policies in the Tenant Settings, manage capacities, set up and configure workspaces, control user access, monitor performance, and implement data governance. Think of it as your dashboard to keep the entire pyramid running smoothly. We won't show you how to create a Tenant and a Capacity in this course; this can be done in Azure, and it's usually within the scope of your Cloud Administrator.

7. Let's practice!

We've looked at the Fabric Hierarchy and the Fabric Admin Portal. Let's practice what we've learned!

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