Overview of the Microsoft Fabric admin portal for the DP-600 exam

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In this post I want to do an overview of the Microsoft Fabric admin portal for the DP-600 exam.

By the end of this post, you will have a good overview of some of the admin settings that might appear in the DP-600 exam. Plus, some recommended resources for the DP-600 exam. Along the way I share plenty of links.

To manage expectations, I will not cover every single setting. Just ones that I think might be relevant for the DP-600 exam.

Reason why doing an overview of the Microsoft Fabric admin portal

I wanted to do this post for a couple of reasons.

First reason is because I have recently gone through Microsoft Fabric admin settings for others a couple of times. Both professionally for my employer Avanade and in addition for my pre-recorded session for the upcoming Power BI & Fabric Summit.

Whilst doing it this I became more of the fact that a large number of people currently are looking to do the DP-600 exam but do not have full access to the Microsoft Fabric admin settings for one reason or another.

This is more relevant now that the exam is now generally available. Which is one reason why I also updated my post that is a checklist to go through before taking the exam.

If you do not currently have access to admin settings, I recommend that you go through my other post. Which shows you how to create your own Microsoft Fabric environment. As well as going through this post of course.

Second reason I wanted to do this post is to raise awareness about some of the things you may need to know for the DP-600 exam. So that when you take the exam it is easier to visualize the content.

One way that I am hoping to do this by introducing some associative memory. In other words, when you are doing the exam, you remember certain settings I highlight that are associated with items to help you remember things.

Accessing the Microsoft Fabric admin portal

Anyway, to access the admin portal you go on the settings icon in the top-right hand corner and select ‘Admin portal’.

Now there are a couple of things that I want to point out relating to a couple of other options before I cover the admin portal.

First of all, if you want to connect to on-premises sources using Dataflows Gen2 you will need to select ‘Manage connections and gateways’ to setup a data gateway.

Secondly, note that you can access the Microsoft Purview hub at the bottom of the menu options. I cover this in more detail in another post about configuring compliance for Microsoft Fabric.

Overview of the Microsoft admin portal

In reality, the admin portal might look familiar to those of you with a Power BI background. Since Microsoft Fabric is based on the Power BI architecture.

As you can see above, it will highlight if there are any new or updated tenant settings at the top of the screen. Which you can expand to view. Just in case there any relevant updates.

Anyway, the setting I want to cover first is where users can create Fabric items. Since it is fairly important.

As you can see in the below screenshot take from my Power BI & Fabric Summit you can configure various options here. Including setting for specific security groups.

You get a bit of flexibility with this setting as well. You can read all about it in the Microsoft documentation to enable Microsoft Fabric for your organization.

Next group of settings I want to highlight are the Information protection settings. Purely to remind you all that according to the DP-600 study guide you need to know how to manage sensitivity labels in semantic models and Lakehouses.

Unlike the DP-500 exam I am not seeing any emphasis on Microsoft Purview.

So, instead of covering the admin API settings I recommend that if you are interested in how configure it in Microsoft Fabric to read a separate Microsoft guide. That covers how to connect to your Microsoft Fabric tenant in the same tenant as Microsoft Purview.

Analytics development lifecycle

Next settings I want to highlight in the tenant settings are the ones for Git integration.

I want to highlight this section for one sole reason. Which is to remind all of you to learn about the CI/CD items in the study guide. In other words the analytics development lifecycle section.

My advice is to first go through all the recommended Microsoft Learn material relating to the analytics lifecycle management.

Afterwards, go through my post about my initial Microsoft Fabric Git integration tests for Power BI Reports by clicking on the below diagram.

So, that when you go to do the exam you can remember that I got you to purposely click on this picture. Which should help you remember about the contents of the blog post you visited.

Anyway, that is all I intend to cover as far as the tenant settings are concerned. For a more in-depth overview you can read the Tenant settings index.

Domain settings

Next, I want to cover domains. In this section you can easily enough create a new domain to allocate to a workspace by clicking the “Create new domain” button.

Once a domain has been created you can click on the ellipsis (…) to the right of the domain name to configure various settings. As you can see below.

I thought I better cover this since the study guide mentions configuring workspace settings. So if this question appears just remember that I configured my Microsoft Learn domain here.

Capacity settings

Now it is time to cover capacity settings. Which is are important for the DP-600 exam.

Due to the fact that you need to know how to manage Fabric capacity. Plus, work with the XMLA endpoint.

As you can see below, you manage your Fabric capacities in the capacity settings.

To get a better understanding of the different capacities and how to buy them I recommend that you read the Microsoft Fabric concepts and licenses guide.

Anyway, to quote a late British comedian “and there’s more”. Because when you click on the capacity name you can configure various other options. As you can see below.

Here you can do a variety of things. Including configuring notifications when you are exceeding your available capacity and allowing workspace admins to size their custom Spark pools.

However, the most notable point for the DP-600 exam is the fact that in the Power BI workloads section you can configure the XMLA endpoint settings.

You can read more about the advantages of doing this in the blog post about XMLA write support for Direct Lake datasets.

Anyway, to help you remember all of this you can remember that I changed the XMLA setting for my trial capacity in this section.

Recommended resources for the DP-600 exam

Microsoft have put a lot of effort into providing resources for both Microsoft Fabric and this exam, and it shows. In addition to the Microsoft Learn material for the DP-600 exam I do recommend some other resources.

To align with the DP-600 exam being available Microsoft released a Fabric Career Hub. To help with your personal development as far as Microsoft Fabric is concerned.

It now includes practice tests for the DP-600 exam. So it is definitely worth looking at.

Plus, Microsoft launched a Microsoft Fabric Launch Digital event at the same time as the public preview announcement at Microsoft Build last year.

I highly recommend watching the videos that were a part of this. To give you a good foundation about what Microsoft Fabric is capable of. Plus, it covers various aspects that are mentioned in the DP-600 study guide. For example, Power BI projects.

You can watch both the Day 1 and the Day 2 videos on for the Microsoft Fabric Launch Digital event on YouTube now.

Final words about this overview of the Microsoft Fabric admin portal for the DP-600 exam

I hope this overview of the Microsoft Fabric admin portal for the DP-600 exam helps some of you.

Because I want to help others who intend to take the DP-600.

Of course, if you have any comments or queries about this post feel free to reach out to me. Especially if it is about my attempt to introduce some associative memory.