Crawl Microsoft Fabric

Discover and catalog Microsoft Fabric workspaces, reports, dashboards, and datasets in Atlan.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

• Completed one of the setup guides:
  • Set up Microsoft Fabric (Service Principal authentication)
  • Set up Microsoft Fabric with Azure API Management (APIM Managed Identity authentication)
• Admin access to your Atlan instance
• If using Agent extraction: Self-Deployed Runtime deployed and configured. Complete the Secure Agent configuration by following the instructions in the How to configure Secure Agent for workflow execution guide.

Create crawler workflow

To crawl metadata from Microsoft Fabric, review the order of operations and then complete the following steps.

1. In the top navigation, click Marketplace.
2. Search for Fabric Assets and select it.
3. Click Install.
4. Once installation completes, click Setup Workflow on the same tile.

If you navigated away before installation completed, go to New > New Workflow and select Fabric Assets to proceed.

Configure authentication

Atlan offers two extraction methods to connect to Microsoft Fabric. Select the method that best fits your security and infrastructure requirements.

Direct

Atlan connects directly to Microsoft Fabric to crawl metadata.

Service Principal

1. For Authentication, select Service Principal.
2. Enter the service principal credentials you configured when setting up Microsoft Fabric:
   • Tenant ID
   • Client ID
   • Client Secret
3. (Optional) Toggle Enable Scanner API Access to control how metadata is extracted. See Scanner API Access for details on capabilities and limitations.
4. Click Test Authentication to confirm connectivity to Microsoft Fabric.
5. Once successful, click Next.

APIM Managed Identity

Use Azure API Management as a gateway so Atlan connects to Microsoft Fabric using managed identity authentication. Complete Set up Microsoft Fabric with Azure API Management before proceeding.

1. For Authentication, select APIM Managed Identity.
2. Enter the APIM credentials you configured during setup:
   • APIM Base URL: The base URL of your APIM instance, for example https://your-apim-instance.azure-api.net/fabric
   • APIM Subscription Key: The subscription key (Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key) for the Atlan product
3. (Optional) Toggle Enable Scanner API Access to control how metadata is extracted. See Scanner API Access for details on capabilities and limitations.
4. Click Test Authentication to confirm connectivity to Microsoft Fabric through APIM.
5. Once successful, click Next.

Agent

Use Atlan's Secure Agent to extract metadata from within your organization's environment. This method is ideal for environments with strict network security requirements.

1. Install Self-Deployed Runtime if you haven't already:
   • Install via Docker Compose
   • Install on Kubernetes
2. Select the Agent tab.
3. Store sensitive information in the secret store configured with the Self-Deployed Runtime and reference the secrets in the corresponding fields. For more information, see Configure secrets for workflow execution.
4. Complete the Secure Agent configuration by following the instructions in the How to configure Secure Agent for workflow execution guide.
5. Click Next after completing the configuration.

Scanner API access

The Enable Scanner API Access toggle controls how Atlan extracts metadata from Microsoft Fabric. The two modes differ in catalog coverage and lineage depth.

Capability	Scanner API enabled	Scanner API disabled
Catalog Workspaces, Lakehouses, Warehouses, Semantic Models, Reports, Dashboards, Dataflows	✅ Available	✅ Available
End-to-end lineage (external sources → Semantic Models)	✅ Available	✅ Available
Catalog Report Pages	❌ Not available	✅ Available
Catalog Report Visuals	❌ Not available	✅ Available
End-to-end lineage to Report Pages and Visuals	❌ Not available	✅ Available
Pipeline Copy Activities cataloged	❌ Not available	✅ Available

When to enable Scanner API Access:

Enable the toggle when your service principal or APIM managed identity doesn't have Viewer access to individual workspaces. Scanner API mode uses only the Power BI Admin Scanner APIs (POST /admin/workspaces/getInfo) and doesn't require workspace-level permissions. This is a common choice for organizations that centralize Fabric administration and prefer not to grant per-workspace access to the crawl identity.

When to disable Scanner API Access:

Disable the toggle when your service principal or APIM managed identity has Viewer access to each workspace. Non-scanner mode uses both scanner and non-scanner APIs, providing full catalog coverage including Report Pages, Visuals, and Pipeline Copy Activities.

For the required permissions for each mode, see Set up Microsoft Fabric.

Configure connection

1. Provide a Connection Name that represents your source environment. For example, you might want to use values like production, development, gold, or analytics.
2. (Optional) To change the users able to manage this connection, change the users or groups listed under Connection Admins. If you don't specify any user or group, nobody can manage the connection, including admins.
3. Click Next to proceed.

Configure crawler

Configure the Microsoft Fabric crawler to specify which workspaces to include or exclude. If a workspace appears in both the include and exclude filters, the exclude filter takes precedence.

• Include Workspaces: Select Microsoft Fabric workspaces to include. Defaults to all workspaces when left blank.
• Exclude Workspaces: Select workspaces to exclude. No workspaces are excluded by default.

Run crawler

1. To check for any permissions or configuration issues before running the crawler, click Preflight checks.

2. You can either:

   • To run the crawler once immediately, click Run.
   • To schedule the crawler to run hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly, click Schedule Run.

Once the crawler has completed running, you can see the assets in Atlan's asset page! 🎉

See also

• What does Atlan crawl from Microsoft Fabric: Understand the metadata and assets that Atlan discovers from your Microsoft Fabric instance
• What lineage does Atlan extract from Microsoft Fabric: Learn about the lineage relationships that Atlan can map from Microsoft Fabric