Yes, You Can Use Fabric to Report on Fabric

By Luisa Torres 

Whether you're building data products or using them to power decisions, knowing how your data is structured makes all the difference. 

Microsoft Fabric makes it easy to build and scale powerful data environments. Keeping track of all those environments? Not always as simple. 

That’s why we started using Fabric to report on itself—unlocking clear, intuitive visibility into everything we’ve built. 

Reporting on Fabric is all about turning its metadata tools inward: surfacing the structure, flow, and relationships behind your data products in one centralized view. It’s a simple idea with big impact—and one that’s helped our team move faster, collaborate smarter, and stay organized at scale. 

Why Report on Microsoft Fabric? 

• See How Data Flows, Visually: Tracking data from source through each transformation layer makes it easier to spot logic, dependencies, and opportunities for optimization. 

• Stay Organized as You Scale: As your data footprint grows, this approach helps you quickly understand what you’ve built—without jumping between workspaces or asking around. 

• Accelerate Team Onboarding: New and existing team members can more easily navigate the data landscape, reducing ramp-up time and improving collaboration. 

• Make Smarter Decisions, Faster: Identify the most relevant tables and columns for any analysis with ease—boosting both speed and accuracy in data-driven work. 

This visibility becomes especially valuable across larger or cross-functional teams, where shared context leads to faster alignment, fewer miscommunications and better business outcomes. 

How We Do It 

We tap into Fabric’s APIs using PySpark notebooks to dynamically pull detailed metadata from our workspaces and Lakehouses—everything from tables and schemas to columns and their characteristics. 

To make that metadata truly usable, we assign a unique key to each asset. Then, we visualize the data in Power BI.  

The result? A clean, interactive experience that helps users of all backgrounds navigate the system and understand how everything connects. 

Solving a Real-World Challenge 

As our own data ecosystem expanded, so did the complexity. Manually checking each Lakehouse to understand what tables existed—and how they were structured—became a time sink. 

We’d already built visualizations to help make sense of specific sources. So we thought: why not apply that same principle to the platform itself? 

That idea led us to develop a custom Fabric Data Explorer—a solution built on Fabric’s metadata that helps both technical and business users quickly see the shape and flow of our data environment. 

It’s helped us eliminate guesswork, avoid confusion, and collaborate with more clarity across every team. 

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Final Thoughts 

Using Fabric to report on Fabric isn’t just an internal organization hack—it’s a strategic way to see your systems clearly, work smarter, and build with confidence. 

A clean, well-mapped foundation pays off. It makes maintenance easier, onboarding smoother, and evolution faster as your needs shift. 

Want to explore how Fabric can help your team gain visibility and scale smarter? 🛰️ Get looped in today.