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From Telemetry to Trust: Using FUAM + Purview Lineage to Make Fabric Governance Pay Off

If you’re running Microsoft Fabric at any real scale, you’ve probably felt the tension: the platform makes it easy to build, share, and iterate—but it also makes it easy to spend, sprawl, and accidentally ship the wrong answer.

The good news is you already have most of the raw ingredients to fix that. What’s missing is an operating model that converts “platform signals” into business outcomes: predictable costs, cleaner estates, and faster response when data is wrong.

In this post I’ll walk through three practical patterns:

using FUAM as a telemetry backbone for FinOps that people will actually use
using the same signals for stale workspace detection (without manual audits)
combining Microsoft Purview lineage with usage signals to identify incorrect datasets that are actively being consumed—and contain the blast radius

Along the way, I’ll stay grounded in business value: what these ideas buy you in dollars, time, and trust.

2025 Year in Review: When Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview Turned “Data + AI” Into a Governed Operating Model

By the end of 2025, the conversation around analytics stopped being about dashboards and started sounding a lot more like operations. The rise of autonomous and semi-autonomous agents put a sharper edge on an old truth: AI only becomes an enterprise capability when the underlying data is trusted, discoverable, and defensible.

Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Purview spent 2025 building toward that reality from opposite (but increasingly overlapping) sides of the house. Fabric pushed the platform forward—unifying workloads, expanding OneLake, and adding new intelligence and database capabilities designed for AI-era workloads. Purview tightened the governance and security loop—making data quality, cataloging, risk visibility, and policy enforcement feel less like a separate initiative and more like part of the daily flow.

This year-in-review walks through the story they told together: how Microsoft Fabric expanded the data platform into a more complete data estate, how Microsoft Purview reframed governance for the AI and agent era, and where the two converged into a more practical, enterprise-ready operating model.

How Entra’s Agent Registry and Purview Team Up to Conquer Agent Sprawl

AI agents are showing up everywhere in the enterprise: Copilot add‑ins, line‑of‑business copilots built in Studio, “helper” bots glued onto SaaS apps, home‑grown automations running in the background. Individually, each one looks harmless. Collectively, they turn into something more dangerous: agent sprawl.

You get dozens (soon hundreds) of agents with overlapping responsibilities, inconsistent permissions, and no clear answer to a basic question: Which agents are touching my critical data, and under what guardrails?

Microsoft’s answer is starting to crystallize:

Microsoft Entra Agent Registry as the single source of truth for agent identity and metadata.
Microsoft Purview for Agents as the enforcement layer for data protection, DLP, insider risk, and compliance—using those identities as first‑class policy subjects.

Beyond the Ontology: How the Rest of Fabric IQ Turns Meaning into Action

Yesterday we went deep on Fabric IQ’s Ontology—the shared vocabulary that teaches Microsoft Fabric how your business actually talks. Today we’ll zoom out to everything else: the graph that lets insights travel across relationships, the agents that answer questions and watch your operations in real time, and the governance and integration that make it usable at scale.

Microsoft Ignite – Wrap Up and Data Platform News

It’s always hard to sit down and fully absorb the information you get at a conference like Microsoft Ignite. You spend a week living in and around the tech world, just trying to drink in everything and interact with as many people as possible. I’m still doing more than a little digesting about what all of these announcements last week have meant, but I’m excited about quite a few of them, especially on the data platform side.

Two Lenses on Purview in MS Fabric

Microsoft uses one brand—Purview—for two scopes. After FabCon Europe (Vienna, Sep 15–18, 2025), the split is even clearer:

Enterprise Purview (in the Purview portal) is your estate‑wide governance, security, and compliance plane: unified catalog, lineage, data quality, sensitivity labels/DLP/audit, DSPM for AI, and (now) Fabric‑aware risk insights.
Purview inside Fabric (OneLake catalog + Purview hub) is the in‑product lens for people building and consuming inside Fabric. The Govern tab is now GA, with domain‑scoped insights; domains have public APIs.

Think of it this way: Fabric’s lens governs work where it’s made; Enterprise Purview governs the whole estate.

FabCon Feature: Purview

On edudatasci.net, I keep data mesh grounded in four behaviors: domains own data; data as a product; a small self‑serve platform; and federated governance (policies expressed as code and applied consistently). I also use foundational vs derived data products as a practical way to think about scope and ownership, and I recommend publishing products in Purview’s Unified Catalog so ownership, access and SLOs are discoverable to the org, not just the team that built them.

FabCon Europe 2025 dropped a number of big announcements related to Purview in Fabric, and I think they – and their connection to Data Mesh are worth talking about.