My own custom web application for Fabric

Just in case if anyone is wondering where I had disappeared to for the last three or so months away from blogging — well I’ve been deep in the trenches working on my own web application for Fabric that I’ve been building from the ground up plus a few other things. It's been an intense but rewarding journey, and I can't wait to share more about it. As I am a hard core .Net developer by heart and data engineer by choice, I thought why not leverage both of my skills to create something unique.

You might be wondering, but why web application over traditional Windows application which is more commonly used ? For example the widely used tool Measure Killer is a windows based application that provides similar features.

The key reason of developing a web application is security and accessibility. A web application can be accessed from anywhere—whether it's your office or personal computer or your mobile device. Unlike traditional Windows applications which require installation on each machine there’s no need to worry about setup or installation. Simply log in from any device provided you have the required permissions and you’re ready to go. And not just that, you can create your own internal authentication on top of SSO Fabric authentication that comes with this web application for robust and better security. Since all the traffic flows through your own web server, you can monitor and potentially block any sensitive data from leaving from this web application which is not possible in a windows application. This provides an added layer of security and control, ensuring that sensitive information stays within your network and doesn’t get exposed to the outside world.

This web application operates entirely in-memory, with no data being stored physically whatsoever. All the actions you see taking place within the application happen directly in memory. Once you close the web app all the operational data in the web application is erased. This tool does not access or scans any business or user data stored in your lakehouses, warehouses, files or databases on the tenant. The tool accesses only the artifact metadada.

Unlike other tools that you might use to get insights into the artifact inventory of your fabric tenant with all those power BI dashboards, this web application has ZERO dependencies on PowerBI. So no more need to worry about the failed PowerBI refreshes the failure of which apparently can hinder your view to details of the artifact existing in the Fabric tenant or no need to be worried about storing the fabric artifact metadata into the power BI dashboards.

Even the charts used in this application are web native and not inherited from the PowerBI dashboards.

And also no need to write and maintain complex and cumbersome Notebooks to get insights from your fabric tenant. This web application provides a very user friendly ,enriching and interactive user experience without the overhead of maintaining the Notebook code.

There are many exciting features available in the tool. Few of which are

• Fetch a list of all the measures across PowerBI reports in the tenant.

• Fetch a list of columns across PowerBI reports in the tenant.

• Fetch page wise list of measures/columns/visuals from a PowerBI report.

• Delete unused columns and measures from the tenant.

• View item lineage

• View Notebook from the web application.

• View PowerBI report from the web application itself.

• View Datapipeline flows and its underlying dependency in the web application.

• Get deep insights from the Lakehouses

..and many more

I’ll be posting a series of blogs and videos that dive deep into the all the features of the tool.

This blog is just a quick preview of the basic Dashboard feature the web application offers.

Login

A Microsoft Entra Single Sign-On (SSO) Entra based authentication to log into the application.

Dashboard

Once authenticated, a dashboard that offers a clean, user-friendly interface providing a simple yet powerful overview of the artifacts of the Fabric tenant.

A graphical summary of the tenant artifacts through heat map and interactive pie charts.

Bar graph with drilldown capabilities

Easy to use navigation into the underlying details of the artifacts.

For example clicking on one of those artifact numbers on the Dashboard, a popup displays details of the underlying artifact. In the screenshot below, I have clicked on the Data pipeline column.

which in turn pop’s up the list of the datapipeline that exist under that specific workspace.

Clicking the View Datapipeline link on the extreme right column in the list above, displays the flow and dependencies of the underlying datapipeline.

Capacity

Drilldown the workspace column to view the capacity details of the underlying workspace

Workspace User Access

Click on the View button under the User Access column to check the user access for the workspace.

Tree Format

If you like to view the workspace artifact data in a Tree format , just click on the Display Hierarchial Data button

Column Chooser

Option to select the columns you want to view on the Dashboard

Menu

Menu option to seamlessly navigate to view different artifact details

As mentioned earlier, I will post a series of blogs to deep dive into different features available in the above menu option to explain them in details. There are still some additional features to be implemented in the application, with the most significant being CI/CD, which is currently WIP.

So stay tuned !!!