If you haven’t already, check out Arun Ulag’s hero blog “FabCon and SQLCon 2026 in Barcelona: Building the data foundation for Microsoft Copilot and Agents” for a complete look at all of our FabCon and SQLCon announcements across both Fabric and our database offerings.
Getting a data project working is only the beginning. As AI makes it easier for more people to build applications, explore information, and create agents, the harder questions arrive sooner: can the solution be deployed consistently, can a team explain what changed, and will someone notice when a dependency fails? Developers need room to experiment, but they also need a dependable route from an isolated feature branch to a production workload that others can operate. Manual setup, disconnected monitoring, and unclear data context make that route harder to repeat.
Administrators face the other side of that growth. More workspaces, users, and workloads mean more decisions about access, compute, spending, and accountability. A capacity spike can affect an unrelated team; a broad security setting may not fit every project. Admins need controls that reflect organizational requirements without turning each development step into a permission request. Developers, in turn, need those boundaries to be understandable and built into their workflows, rather than discovered just before release.
Today, we're announcing Microsoft Fabric platform updates to help you tackle both sides of that challenge. They connect operational signals with investigation, make delivery more repeatable, and bring governed discovery into the tools you use. We're also expanding your options for managing compute demand and applying controls across your estate.
Introducing observability in Fabric (Preview)
A failed job rarely tells the whole story. With the introduction of observability in Fabric, you can connect signals across jobs, workspaces, items, and capacities rather than investigate each in isolation. A Monitor item acts as a single management unit across capacities and your tenant, bringing early detection, contextual investigation, and central management into one operational experience.
Unified workspace monitoring (Preview)
We're introducing unified workspace monitoring so you can choose which Eventhouse receives your telemetry and consolidate multiple workspaces into that shared store. Instead of monitoring workspaces individually, you can bring related signals together and manage their storage centrally. You control retention and caching policies to suit your investigation and operational needs. When a failure crosses workspace boundaries, for example, you can correlate the telemetry in one place and follow the issue across those boundaries. Most Fabric items will be available at launch, with additional workloads becoming available over time.
The new experience also simplifies how you connect monitoring to your own tools. A custom endpoint on the monitoring Event Stream lets you copy data to external or custom destinations, while public APIs support integration with your external observability tools. Simplified, API-backed onboarding makes setup repeatable for automation and agents. You can establish a shared monitoring approach, then extend it to additional workspaces without treating every setup as a separate manual exercise.
Figure: Configuring unified workspace monitoring and routing workspace telemetry to a shared Eventhouse.Refreshed Monitor Hub (Preview)
The refreshed Monitor Hub helps you see where attention is needed before opening individual investigations. We're adding ready-made, at-scale views across workloads, jobs, apps, agents, alerts, and capacities, with a centralized health overview and data health monitoring. That broader view helps you spot emerging issues and consider their downstream impact rather than starting with a single failed activity.
Capacity consumption and available headroom sit alongside operational signals, so you can consider resource pressure as you assess an issue. Start with the health overview, narrow your focus to the affected area, and move into investigation with that context. The hub connects navigation and operational visibility; the capacity administration actions described later let you respond when the next step is a control change.
Figure: Reviewing capacity health and available headroom in the refreshed Monitor Hub.Agentic investigation and alerting with operations agents and Activator
We're also adding the ability to use operations agents to investigate end-to-end causes, develop evidence-backed hypotheses, assess impact, and recommend next steps. You can engage with the investigation, refine its direction, and choose your response. This brings the supporting evidence and relevant dependencies into the conversation instead of leaving you to assemble every clue yourself. Currently this capability can help you investigate pipeline failures, with further support planned.
New Activator-powered job alerts notify you about successes as well as failures. You can automate alerts and configure responses, connecting investigation with the operational workflows your team uses. Together, these enhancements help you move from noticing an event to understanding its likely impact and deciding what to do next.
Repeatable delivery and governed discovery for developers
Operational confidence starts before deployment. The latest enhancements, designed with developers in mind, help you package a solution, review changes, move definitions between environments, and find reusable data worth reusing with fewer manual handoffs between those steps.
Introducing deployment plans (Preview)
With the deployment plans now in preview as first-class workspace items, you can define the exact deployment order on a visual canvas, with YAML as the source of truth. You can include pre- and post-deployment steps, such as hydrating a lakehouse with a notebook, running a pipeline before dependent items, or validating data after deployment.
Your plan follows the solution through Git branch-out, initial sync, updates, deployment pipelines, and bulk import. Preparation and validation become part of the deployment sequence rather than a separate checklist.
Figure: Defining deployment order and dependencies on the deployment plan canvas.Bulk Item Definition APIs, quotas, and API limits (Generally Available and Preview)
Bulk import and export item definition APIs are also now generally available. You can move multiple definitions in one call; imports automatically determine deployment order and update references for the destination workspace. This supports workspace-as-code, CI/CD, and migration.
We're also enhancing the Fabric API platform with a unified quota model and increased limits for core APIs. These updates provide more consistent throttling and quota management while supporting higher-scale automation, CI/CD, and enterprise workloads, making it easier to build and operate Fabric solutions at scale.
Git integration enhancements (Generally Available and Preview)
The new branch workspace administration delegation capability, now in preview, gives developers a governed, self-service way to create branch workspaces without permission to create workspaces or assign capacity. Administrators define the branch workspace admin profile, including the role, admins, capacity, and delegated settings applied to each new branch workspace, helping teams move faster while maintaining consistent guardrails.
We're also expanding the Git workflow with file-level commits for supported items (Preview) and contributor branch switching (Preview). You can commit only the files that are ready while leaving unfinished changes in the workspace, and contributors can switch the Git branch connected to a workspace when administrators enable the capability. Additionally, selective branching, change comparison and commits, and branched workspace relationships, now generally available, helping teams keep feature work focused, review changes before acting, and manage branching from a clearer source control experience.
Figure: Comparing and selectively committing item-level changes through Fabric Git integration.Discover data in OneLake catalog and your coding workflow
The OneLake catalog gives you a richer, more granular way to explore and understand data across Fabric before you use it. With the latest updates, you can go beyond finding Fabric items to explore individual tables and columns, review descriptions, and preview the underlying data directly in the catalog. Quick actions, personalized views, and filters, including domains and tags, add business context so you can evaluate whether data is right for your needs before you start working with it (Generally Available).
We've also expanded the OneLake catalog search API to return relevance-ranked Fabric items, OneLake tables from lakehouses, mirrored sources, and semantic model tables in one result set (Preview). This brings the same granular discovery to programmatic search, helping applications find relevant data across Fabric regardless of where it lives.
OneLake catalog discovery in GitHub Copilot CLI is now generally available through Skills for Fabric. You can find Fabric items and tables from the CLI before writing code, bringing this richer, governed discovery experience directly into your coding workflow rather than requiring a separate search.
Bring catalog discovery into Excel and Microsoft Foundry
Finally, OneLake catalog in Excel is now in preview, enabling you to discover and analyze Fabric data in your workbooks without copying or moving the underlying source data. OneLake row- and column-level security and Microsoft Purview label-based protections apply, connecting familiar analysis with the protections associated with your source.
New OneLake catalog additions in Microsoft Foundry bring enterprise data discovery into your AI development workflow (Preview). With an embedded catalog and a unified view across Fabric and Foundry, you can find trusted data and add it to knowledge, agents, and workflows.
Figure: Adding trusted OneLake catalog data as a knowledge source in Microsoft Foundry.Effectively administer capacities and spending
As your solutions reach production, capacity administrators need to optimize spend for steady demand while seamlessly managing bursts. With today’s announcements, we are adding new billing choices and capacity controls, as well as tools that help you investigate usage, automate responses, and act across capacities.
Introducing on-demand compute and zero-provisioned capacity (Preview)
As data and AI workloads grow, organizations need flexible ways to align costs with actual usage. Building on Autoscale Billing for Spark, we're introducing on-demand billing across Microsoft Fabric in preview soon, enabling workloads to scale elastically when needed, minimizing throttling during demand spikes, and allowing you to pay only for the compute you consume.
We're also introducing Fabric zero-provisioned (F0), a new entry point to Fabric and OneLake that removes the need to provision compute before getting started. With on-demand billing enabled by default, organizations can immediately access Fabric services and pay only for the resources they use. Together, on-demand billing and Fabric zero-provisioned make it easier to start small, scale as demand grows, and combine consumption-based pricing with reserved or provisioned capacity to optimize both performance and cost. These capabilities will be available in the coming weeks.
Whether you're running workloads that tend to spike, experimenting with new projects, or supporting production applications, on-demand billing gives you greater flexibility without requiring upfront capacity planning.
Surge protection, overage, and larger capacities (Generally Available)
Workspace-level surge protection will be generally available soon. You can set a workspace consumption limit, automatically isolating runaway or non-critical workloads so they don't impact mission-critical workloads or cause capacity-wide throttling. You can manage these controls in OneLake catalog or Monitor Hub, which also allows you to mark mission-critical workspaces exempt from the limit.
Additionally, capacity overage is now generally available, letting you use additional paid compute with configured spending thresholds and notifications rather than sizing capacity solely for rare peaks. For sustained high demand, we've added the F4096 and F8192 capacity SKUs (also Generally Available), extending your options for larger workloads.
Monitor, act, and automate your capacities
Monitoring helps you understand who's consuming resources, identify demand spikes, and ensure critical workloads continue to perform as expected. New capacity metrics app enhancements help you investigate health-state duration, capacity units per second, daily and hourly heatmaps, and top item contributors (Generally Available). Clearer drilldowns support deeper analysis, while chargeback app integration helps you allocate usage.
Figure: Reviewing capacity health-state duration and workload activity across capacities.Capacity overview events in Real-Time Hub (Generally Available), with new operation events (Preview) adding workspace- and item-level visibility. These signals enable proactive capacity monitoring by helping administrators identify emerging hotspots, usage anomalies, and resource-intensive operations before they impact users. Connect them to Real-Time Intelligence, Eventhouse, and Activator to automate alerts and actions, retain history for capacity planning, or integrate insights into your existing monitoring systems.
With the refreshed Monitor Hub, we're taking the first step toward bringing capacity insights and management actions together in a single experience. Capacity Insights & Actions (preview) lets administrators identify emerging issues and immediately respond by adjusting surge and overage settings, migrating workspaces, or resizing capacity. Use Monitor Hub for monitoring and operational decisions, and the capacity metrics app for deeper usage analysis.
Unify governance, security, and control in the OneLake catalog
As AI helps more people build with data, tenant admins are responsible for governing an estate that’s growing in both size and complexity. More workspaces, data items, and access requests mean more decisions about what people can share, which settings they can change, and how to protect sensitive data. Admins need to support new projects without turning every decision into a manual review, or losing visibility into how data is used.
That balance between enabling teams and maintaining the right guardrails is critical. As Jayakumar Pankajatchan, Distinguished Engineer at KPMG, shared, “Client trust starts with security. Every engagement needs clear data boundaries and strong guardrails, so information flows only where intended. With Microsoft Fabric, we strengthen governance across engagements while enabling teams to deliver insights with confidence at scale.”
We’re expanding governance and security in Fabric to help organizations put those guardrails into practice without slowing teams down. With more centralized management, AI-assisted governance guidance, granular policies, and broader network protection, you can give your teams room to innovate while maintaining controls that reflect your organization’s requirements.
Introducing policies in Fabric (Preview)
With policies in Fabric (Preview), we're introducing precise, attribute-based controls that help organizations enforce governance requirements based on user and data attributes, rather than relying solely on broad settings. Policies enable granular controls for key scenarios, with item creation and workspace security supported at launch and external data sharing coming soon.
A centralized policy management experience, monitoring, APIs, and CI/CD integration support policy lifecycle management at scale, supporting more consistent and automated governance across your organization.
Figure: Creating an item creation policy with attribute-based conditions and controls.
"Fabric’s Item Creation Policies have strengthened our governance controls for Microsoft Fabric, allowing us to scale innovation across the organization by empowering users with the right capabilities while maintaining clear boundaries for platform management and compliance,” said Bernard Beeftink Lead Product Owner, BI, ABN AMRO.
Centralizing governance in the OneLake catalog
We're expanding the OneLake catalog Govern experience (Generally Available) with centralized governance capabilities that bring management of tenants, domains, capacities, workspaces, tags, and policies into a unified experience. Rich contextual signals, insights, and recommendations help administrators better understand their governance posture and take informed action across their data estate.
Figure: The Govern experience in the OneLake catalog provides estate-wide governance insights and recommended actions.We're also introducing Govern Skills as part of skills-for-fabric. Govern Skills provide AI-powered guidance across the health, security, and trustworthiness of your data. Govern Skills help administrators identify governance risks, monitor the health of their data estate, and take recommended actions to maintain a secure, trusted, and well-governed foundation for analytics and AI.
Outbound access protection expansion (Generally Available and Preview)
We've expanded outbound access protection to OneLake shortcuts (Generally Available), along with new coverage for maps in Fabric and operations agents (Preview). You can extend your outbound controls across these experiences while building on existing foundations such as Microsoft Entra, Private Link, customer-managed keys, and workspace IP firewall rules.
FQDN allowlist for outbound protected workspaces (Preview)
FQDN support for Spark simplifies secure connectivity for organizations using OAP-enforced Fabric workspaces, where Private Endpoints are often required to access dependent services. Instead of creating and managing Private Endpoints for every resource a Spark workload needs to reach, administrators can use domain-based network controls to securely enable connectivity through approved FQDNs. This reduces networking complexity, lowers operational overhead, and accelerates onboarding while maintaining enterprise security and compliance requirements. This capability will be available in the coming weeks.
Fabric availability in Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCC High)
We are also expanding Microsoft Fabric to Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCC High) customers. Support for GCC High extends Fabric to organizations that require U.S. sovereign cloud environments and compliance with frameworks such as DoD Impact Level 4, CJIS, DFARS, and NIST 800-171.
Put the updates to work
Start with the friction you encounter most: investigating failures, reproducing deployments, finding data, or managing demand and controls. Our updates connect those responsibilities without requiring every team to use the same workflow. Match adoption to your readiness requirements, then extend your approach as your data estate grows.
In addition to the announcements above, we are also rolling out a broad set of innovation across Fabric. For a broad overview of all these announcements, read Arun Ulag’s hero blog “FabCon and SQLCon 2026 in Barcelona: Building the data foundation for Microsoft Copilot and Agents.” If you want a more detailed look, visit the Fabric September 2026 feature summary blog, the Power BI September 2026 feature summary blog, and the latest posts on the Fabric Updates channel and the Azure Data Tech Community blog channel.
Power BI Team