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Onelake Catalog CLI

MicrosoftOfficialPublished by Microsoft

  • Skill
  • Workflow
  • Automation and integrations
  • MIT
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From the author

Governs and curates the Microsoft Fabric OneLake catalog through Fabric Admin, Core and Power BI REST APIs. Use for tenant or data-owner governance audits and guarded remediation of domains, workspace assignment, capacity, labels, tag definitions, workspace tags, certification, refresh and item identity, and for owners curating an item's description, name, tags and table and column descriptions. Item discovery belongs to search-consumption-cli.
— the description by Microsoft

AutoGineer summary

Written by AutoGineer from the skill’s own files, not by the author

The onelake-catalog-cli skill provides a structured interface for managing the Microsoft Fabric OneLake catalog. It operates through distinct modes for governance auditing and metadata curation, ensuring that actions are performed with appropriate permissions and safety gates. The skill supports tenant-wide admin audits, data-owner governance checks, and item-level metadata curation, including descriptions, tags, and table/column metadata. It enforces strict write-gating and requires explicit owner approval for all changes to ensure data integrity and security.

What it does

  • Audits tenant-wide or workspace-specific governance posture.
  • Curates item metadata including descriptions, display names, and tags.
  • Manages table and column descriptions for items with OneLake Tables.
  • Performs guarded remediation for domains, workspace assignments, and capacities.
  • Provides dry-run capabilities for governance and remediation tasks.
  • Enforces strict write-gates requiring explicit user approval for all changes.

When to use it

  • When you need to audit governance posture across a Fabric tenant or specific workspaces.
  • When an item owner needs to improve discoverability through metadata curation.
  • When a data owner needs to remediate workspace domain, capacity, or tag assignments.
  • When a tenant admin needs to perform bulk governance updates or policy enforcement.

Advantages

  • Provides a unified, mode-based workflow for both auditing and remediation.
  • Enforces safety by requiring explicit approval for all write operations.
  • Supports granular, least-privileged access for data owners.
  • Includes built-in logic for handling long-running operations and API rate limits.
  • Ensures governance findings are actionable and prioritized.

Usage examples

“Propose a better description for the semantic model Sales Model in the Finance workspace.”
The agent will read the current item metadata, draft a suggested description based on content, and present it for owner approval before applying the change.
“Audit our tenant's OneLake catalog governance posture and prioritize the findings.”
The agent will perform a tenant-wide audit, applying the necessary scope filters, and report findings categorized by pillar with recommended actions.
“Which workspaces I administer are not assigned to a domain?”
The agent will identify and list all workspaces within the caller's scope that lack a domain assignment.
“Show a dry run for assigning these workspaces to the Finance domain, including current assignments.”
The agent will perform a read-only check to display the current domain assignments and the proposed changes for the specified workspaces.

Install

  1. Download the skill as a ZIP:

    https://autogineer.com/agent-skills/microsoft/onelake-catalog-cli/download
  2. Unzip it into the cross-client skills folder of your project:

    mkdir -p .agents/skills && unzip onelake-catalog-cli.zip -d .agents/skills

Documentation by Microsoft

Telemetry — MANDATORY. Every api.fabric.microsoft.com call must carry x-ms-fabric-skill: onelake-catalog-cli (az rest: --headers "x-ms-fabric-skill=onelake-catalog-cli"), including every LRO poll, fabric_lro and retry. Snippets omit it — add it anyway.

CRITICAL NOTES

  1. To find the workspace ID from its name, one call: az rest --method get --resource "https://api.fabric.microsoft.com" --url "https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/v1/workspaces" --query "value[?displayName=='<name>'] | [0].id" -o tsv (follow continuationToken only if it isn't on the first page; details in COMMON-CLI.md § Finding Workspaces and Items in Fabric).

  2. To find an item's ID, one call: the same on .../v1/workspaces/{ws}/items?type=<Type> with --query "value[?displayName=='<name>'] | [0].id".

  3. Write-gated skill — never call a write API before its gate below has passed. For curation that means the owner reviewed every proposed change and explicitly confirmed — not even a "test" write to check whether a change is allowed or what is already applied.

  4. The item list and Get Item both return an item's tags. An item with no tags has no tags field — that absence means untagged.

OneLake Catalog — CLI Skill (mode dispatcher)

One skill for the OneLake catalog. Govern (catalog health, protection and trust: audits and guarded remediation, by permission tier) and curate (an owner improving specific items' discoverability metadata) are modes, each detailed in a reference loaded on demand. This file picks the mode, holds every write gate, and indexes the references.

Mode selection

ModeUse whenLoadWrites
curateAn owner wants specific items easier to find: a description, a clearer display name, tags, or table and column descriptions (items with a OneLake Tables folder) — one item, an explicit list, or one named workspace's weakly-described itemsreferences/curate.md✅ after the owner approves each suggestion
dataowner-auditA non-admin workspace or domain owner wants governance posture for workspaces they administer (widen to accessible on request; Core API)references/dataowner-audit.md❌
dataowner-remediateA data owner who is also a domain / workspace / capacity admin fixes a governance finding — single-workspace domain or capacity assignment, workspace tags, refresh, item identity (Core & Power BI APIs, no tenant admin), including dry runs of thesereferences/dataowner-remediate.md✅ self-service
admin-auditA Fabric tenant admin wants tenant-wide governance posture (/v1/admin/*)references/admin-audit.md; any tenant count starts from admin-audit-scope.md❌
admin-remediateA Fabric tenant admin makes tenant-wide writes — domains, bulk assignment, domain roles, bulk labels, tenant tag definitions, tenant settingsreferences/admin-remediate.md✅

Govern is a 2×2 grid — tier (which API surface the caller can reach) × action (audit vs remediate) — covering the health, protect and trust pillars. Choose the tier by API surface, not job title: the admin-* modes need the Fabric tenant administrator role (Fabric admin / Power Platform admin / M365 global admin); domain, capacity and workspace admins who are not tenant admins live entirely in the dataowner-* modes.

Mode boundary rules
  • A direct curation request goes straight to curate. Read the target item's current state — don't run a governance audit first. Curation needs neither tenant admin nor workspace Admin; each change has its own permission (see curate.md).

  • Governance starts with an audit. Never remediate before establishing the current state; audit → remediate within the same tier unless the caller's rights change.

  • Curate is the only writer of item metadata. Item descriptions and display names, applying or removing an item's tags, and table and column descriptions are written only in curate. Workspace tags stay in dataowner-remediate; tenant tag definitions in admin-remediate.

  • Govern finds, curate fixes. Govern reports description and tag coverage — presence, with scope, denominator and freshness caveats, not proof the text is accurate; curate judges content and proposes. To fix selected gaps, hand off to curate with: a bounded target (an explicit item list with workspace ID, item ID and type, or one named workspace — never the whole tenant: ask the user to pick), the observed gap with its source and time (a candidate to recheck, not current truth), only the fields the user chose ("fix missing descriptions" = description only), and known access limits and owner contacts. A remediation is done only when curate has verified the write.

  • Audit modes never write. If a write is asked for in an audit mode, switch explicitly to the matching remediate mode or to curate — don't improvise a write.

  • A dry run or preflight of a fix loads that fix's remediate mode and stays read-only there — it isn't an audit. Moving one workspace to a domain is dataowner-remediate; bulk assignment is admin-remediate.

  • Finding items when the workspace isn't known belongs to search-consumption-cli. Looking up a workspace or domain by name, or an item by name inside a known workspace, is not discovery: use the lookups in CRITICAL NOTES and don't load search-consumption-cli for it.

⚠️ Known Fabric gap. A domain or workspace admin who is not a tenant admin has no API for their scoped governance posture: /v1/admin/* rejects them and the Core API can't list a domain's workspaces. dataowner-audit covers only workspaces the caller can access — say so up front rather than routing into an admin-* mode that will 401/403.

Terminal write — the step you must not skip

Reading a reference, drafting suggestions or building a dry run is NOT completing a write. Each writing mode ends with the state-changing call(s) below, issued only after the gate for that write passes. If you did not issue it, nothing changed — say so rather than reporting success.

ModeTerminal write
curatePATCH /v1/workspaces/{ws}/items/{id} (description; display name in a separate call), POST .../items/{id}/applyTags or unapplyTags, and for a table POST https://onelake.table.fabric.microsoft.com/common/v1/{ws}/{item}/schemas/{schema}/tables/{table}/additionalMetadata with the complete set from a fresh read — only for suggestions the owner accepted
dataowner-remediatePOST /v1/workspaces/{id}/assignToDomain / unassignFromDomain (synchronous 200), assignToCapacity (202 — poll to a terminal state), POST /v1/workspaces/{id}/applyTags / unapplyTags (workspace tags), item identity, semantic model refresh
admin-remediate/v1/admin/* writes — domains, bulk workspace assignment, domain roles, labels, tenant tag definitions, tenant settings
dataowner-audit, admin-auditnone — read-only

Before reporting a write done, confirm an explicit success (200/201, or a terminal LRO success for a 202) and read the result back.

Write gates — must pass first
WriteModeGate
Any curation writecurateThe owner saw a numbered current → proposed preview of every suggestion and explicitly approved; "apply all" covers only what was shown. Approving an audit or picking a remediation never approves text the owner hasn't seen.
Table and column descriptionscurateA write replaces the table's whole additional metadata: re-read, change only the approved descriptions, send the complete set in the same command, read again. The API has no concurrency check — never claim concurrent edits were preserved. A shortcut table is written on its source — name it and get explicit confirmation.
Delete a domainadminCheck subdomains (parentDomainId) and assigned-workspace counts for the domain and every subdomain; if workspaces would be orphaned, STOP and get explicit confirmation naming them. The API has no cascade-block. See domain-crud.md.
Delete a tag definitionadminReport how many items carry it first — deletion detaches it everywhere with no undo.
Bulk-assign workspaces to a domainadminCheck each target's current domainId and warn before silently overriding an assignment. Dry-run the target list first.
Remove a principal from a domain roleadminConfirm it will not leave the domain ownerless; name the principal being removed.
Bulk sensitivity-label changeadminDry-run: show the affected items and before/after label, get confirmation. No service principal / managed identity — the call will fail.
Write a tenant settingadminRead and show the current value, then the proposed value — tenant-wide blast radius.
Assign / unassign one workspace to a domaindataownerA move is a reassignment — confirm the current domainId and name the domain it leaves. Needs domain contributor and workspace Admin; say which is missing on failure.
Reassign item ownership (item identity, preview)dataownerAssigns to the caller only; needs Write on the item and its children. Confirm the intended identity.
Assign a workspace to a capacitydataownerNeeds workspace Admin plus capacity Contributor/Admin. 202 is not success — poll to a terminal state.
Apply / remove a workspace tag (preview)dataownerNeeds workspace Admin. Name the workspace and the tags, and confirm. Removing an applied tag is not deleting its definition.

Don't promise a write that has no API. Endorsement, DLP policies, an owner changing a sensitivity label, and tenant-admin item deletion have no write route — say so and name who can act (no-write-api-escalation.md). A SQL Database's display name is fixed at creation: never send a rename for it, even when the owner asks for one — say it can't be renamed and offer the description and tags instead.

Shared essentials (all modes)

  • Prerequisites: auth & tokens · REST, pagination, LRO, rate limits · CLI auth recipes · az rest (always pass --resource) · OneLake via curl (Storage-audience token) · OneLake shortcuts.

  • Resolve workspace and item IDs with the one-call lookups in CRITICAL NOTES 1–2.

  • Keep tool calls few. Each call re-sends the whole conversation, so extra calls are slow and costly. Combine related reads in one script, and don't re-open a doc you've already read.

  • Read an item's definition in one command that waits for the long-running operation itself (a semantic model usually returns 202) — never poll it in separate calls. It waits as long as Fabric's Retry-After asks (often 20–30 s), so give the command up to 3 minutes: if your shell tool has a wait or timeout setting, raise it rather than letting the command move to the background. Only for types with a definition: Warehouse, SQL Database, SQL analytics endpoint, ML model/experiment and Datamart have none — read their schema instead. PowerShell 7 (bash: fabric_lro in COMMON-CLI.md):

    $h = @{ Authorization = "Bearer $(az account get-access-token --resource https://api.fabric.microsoft.com --query accessToken -o tsv)"; 'x-ms-fabric-skill' = 'onelake-catalog-cli' }
    $st = @{ n = 0; end = (Get-Date).AddMinutes(3) }
    # Waits the full Retry-After (202 and 429); backs off 2-30 s only when the header is missing or invalid.
    function Wait-RetryAfter($r) { $ra = 0
      if (-not [int]::TryParse("$(@($r.Headers['Retry-After'])[0])", [ref]$ra) -or $ra -lt 1) { $ra = [Math]::Min(30, [Math]::Pow(2, ++$st.n)) }
      if ((Get-Date).AddSeconds($ra) -gt $st.end) { throw "Definition read did not finish within 3 minutes." }
      Start-Sleep -Seconds $ra }
    while (($r = Invoke-WebRequest -Method Post -Uri "https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/v1/workspaces/$WS_ID/items/$ITEM_ID/getDefinition" -Headers $h -SkipHttpErrorCheck).StatusCode -eq 429) { Wait-RetryAfter $r }
    if ($r.StatusCode -ge 400) { throw "getDefinition returned $($r.StatusCode): $($r.Content)" }
    $def = if ($r.StatusCode -eq 202) {
      $op = [string]$r.Headers['Location']; $res = $r; $s = ''
      while ($s -notin 'Succeeded', 'Failed') {
        Wait-RetryAfter $res; $res = Invoke-WebRequest $op -Headers $h -SkipHttpErrorCheck
        if ($res.StatusCode -eq 200) { $s = ($res.Content | ConvertFrom-Json).status } elseif ($res.StatusCode -ne 429) { throw "Polling returned $($res.StatusCode): $($res.Content)" } }
      if ($s -ne 'Succeeded') { throw "Definition read failed: $($res.Content)" }
      while (($res = Invoke-WebRequest "$op/result" -Headers $h -SkipHttpErrorCheck).StatusCode -eq 429) { Wait-RetryAfter $res }
      if ($res.StatusCode -ge 400) { throw "Definition result returned $($res.StatusCode): $($res.Content)" }
      $res.Content | ConvertFrom-Json
    } else { $r.Content | ConvertFrom-Json }
    $dir = New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path (Join-Path ([IO.Path]::GetTempPath()) "def-$ITEM_ID")
    foreach ($p in $def.definition.parts) {
      $t = [Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetString([Convert]::FromBase64String($p.payload)); $f = Join-Path $dir ($p.path -replace '[\\/:]', '_'); Set-Content -LiteralPath $f -Value $t
      "== $($p.path) ($($t.Length) chars)"; if ($t.Length -le 4000) { $t } else { $t.Substring(0, 4000); "[first 4000 of $($t.Length) chars; full text in $f]" } }

    A part cut at 4,000 characters is saved in full: read the rest (one call) if what's shown isn't enough.

  • Use the exact Fabric Admin, Core, Power BI, Graph or OneLake API surface the mode documents; a 401 or 403 is never permission to bypass RBAC.

Rules

MUST
  • Load exactly one mode reference for the request and follow it end to end; come back to the index below when another procedure is needed. In curate, also read the suggestion guidance before drafting anything, and the table metadata reference before any table or column work.

  • (curate) Propose exactly what the owner asked for. A specific request gets only that: "add a description" → the item description; "suggest tags" → tags; "describe the table" → the table description only; "describe the columns" → column descriptions only; "describe the item's objects" or "its tables and columns" → both. A general request ("curate this item", "make it more discoverable", "improve its metadata") gets the item's description, name and tags; an item with a OneLake Tables folder also gets its table and column descriptions. If the owner names several items, cover each one, and report each with only the fields it has.

  • (curate) Check the scope before any call. Curate covers one item, an explicit list of items, or one named workspace at a time. For a tenant-wide request ("all my items", "every workspace"), say plainly that it isn't supported and offer one named workspace or an explicit list; for several named workspaces, ask which to start with. Don't list workspaces or items first.

  • (govern) State scope, exclusions, pagination completeness, and freshness caveats with every governance statistic.

PREFER
  • Least-privileged Core or Power BI APIs for data-owner actions instead of requiring tenant-admin rights.

  • Findings as evidence, consequence, recommended action, priority and effort — not an inventory dump.

  • Sequencing ownership and access-scope fixes before bulk assignment or labeling.

AVOID
  • Mutating a tenant from an audit mode, or reporting an asynchronous 202 as completion.

  • Inventing write APIs for endorsement, DLP policy, admin item deletion, or third-party item-identity assignment.

  • (curate) Volunteering anything about table or column descriptions for items without a OneLake Tables folder (semantic models, reports, notebooks, pipelines, dataflows, …). For these items, description, name and tags are the complete list — present them without qualifiers in the preview and whenever you say what the skill can do (e.g. while declining a request, or offering what else you could review next). Don't add a note that table or column descriptions are N/A, don't apply or aren't covered, and don't offer them: the owner didn't ask. Only if they ask, answer that they aren't supported for that item type, then stop and let the owner choose — don't load another skill or draft those descriptions yourself.

  • (curate) Saying "sub-items" — use the owner's words: "tables" and "columns", or "objects" when speaking generally.

References

Each reference is one hop from this index; after loading one, return here when another is needed.

Curate

Govern — shared

Govern — modes

  • Admin audit — tenant-wide read-only governance assessment

  • Admin audit scope — governable denominator (active workspaces of type Workspace), exclusions, and known blind spots

  • Admin audit assessment — end-to-end evaluative workflow, prioritization, and deliverable contract

  • Admin remediate — tenant-wide guarded writes through Admin APIs

  • Data-owner audit — caller-scoped read-only checks through Core APIs, including a workspace's domain assignment

  • Data-owner workspace health — empty and inactive workspaces within the caller's scope

  • Data-owner remediate — least-privileged Core and Power BI writes: moving one workspace to a domain, capacity, workspace tags, refresh, item identity

Govern — admin audit procedures: domain health · workspace health · capacity health · item inventory · item health · protect coverage · trust curation

Govern — admin remediation procedures: domain lifecycle · bulk workspace assignment (tenant admin) · domain roles · tag definitions · item sensitivity labels · domain default labels · trust remediation · no-write escalation

Examples

I'm curating my items for the OneLake catalog. Propose a better description for the semantic model Sales Model in the Finance workspace.
Make the lakehouse LSEGDemo more discoverable — describe its tables and columns too.
Audit our tenant's OneLake catalog governance posture and prioritize the findings.
Which workspaces I administer are not assigned to a domain?
Show a dry run for assigning these workspaces to the Finance domain, including current assignments.
Find unlabeled items tenant-wide and explain which remediations require a tenant admin versus a data owner.

Files

references/admin-audit/health-workspaces.md

Workspace Health — Unused Workspaces and Admin Gaps

Contents

  • Find Unused Workspaces (Empty vs. Inactive)

  • Find Workspace Admin Gaps (Bus Factor and Policy Thresholds)

  • Gotchas — Workspace Health

Read this when: Deciding whether a workspace is genuinely abandoned, and whether it has enough admins to survive one person leaving.

Part of the onelake-catalog-cli skill (admin-audit mode). Return to SKILL.md for scoping rules, blind spots and the full posture workflow.


⚠️ Scope — tenant-wide, via the Admin API

Enumerate the estate with GET /v1/admin/workspaces?type=Workspace&state=Active and filter by name (the Admin object uses name, not displayName). Do NOT use the user-scoped Core GET /v1/workspaces for inventory — it returns only workspaces the caller has a role on and under-reports the tenant even for an admin. State the scope in your answer; if the Admin API returns 403 and you fall back to Core, label the result as user-scoped, not tenant-wide.


Reporting template. Don't stop at counts — report each applicable finding as finding → evidence → why it matters → recommended action → priority → effort, and state clean/pass results explicitly ("checked, no gap"). Priority tracks blast radius × compounding signals; effort must say whether a tenant admin can fix it or must escalate. Canonical definition: the shared Deliverable Contract.

Find Unused Workspaces (Empty vs. Inactive)

"Unused" is two different findings with two different costs. Never conflate them, and never report one as the other.

FindingMeansSourceCost
EmptyContains zero items/v1/admin/items, already fetchedFree
InactiveNobody has done anything in itActivity Events APIExpensive — one call per day over the retention window
Empty workspaces (zero items) — cheap, always do this

Reuse the item inventory you already fetched. Group items by workspaceId, then find active workspaces with no entry:

jq -r --slurpfile ws /tmp/active_workspaces.json '
  [.[] | .workspaceId] | unique as $withItems
  | $ws[0] | map(select(.id as $i | ($withItems | index($i)) | not))
  | map({id, name, capacityId, domainId}) | .[]' /tmp/all_items.json

Empty-but-assigned matters most. A domain containing empty workspaces reports healthy assignment coverage while delivering nothing discoverable. Always report empty-but-assigned separately — it is the case where the health metric and reality diverge.

⚠️ Empty does not mean unused

An empty workspace can still be actively worked in — items created and deleted, shortcuts rewritten, queries run — and show zero items at the moment you sample it. Recommending deletion on an item count of zero can destroy a workspace in active use.

State the item count as what it is — an inventory fact, not a usage verdict.

Prove item coverage before calling a workspace empty

"Empty" is a claim about the whole Fabric estate of a workspace, so it is only as trustworthy as the inventory behind it. An emptiness verdict from a partial inventory is worse than no verdict — it invites deletion.

  • Use an all-Fabric item inventory, and page it fully. GET /v1/admin/items returns a server-provided continuationUri; follow it until it is empty. A truncated first page makes populated workspaces look empty. When drilling into a specific candidate, scope with GET /v1/admin/items?workspaceId={id} — but page every response to exhaustion before trusting a zero count.

  • Never infer emptiness from Power BI-only results. The Power BI scanner (getInfo) and the Power BI-audience APIs enumerate Power BI artifacts, not the full Fabric item set (lakehouses, notebooks, data pipelines, KQL databases, eventstreams, …). A workspace can return zero Power BI artifacts and still hold Fabric items. Determine emptiness only from the all-Fabric /v1/admin/items inventory — the same one this skill already fetches — not from a scanner result.

  • If coverage cannot be proven, report unknown, not empty. If any page failed, an item type was excluded, or the inventory was Power BI-scoped, you have not proven zero items. Report the workspace as coverage unknown and state what was missing — do not fold it into the empty count.

⚠️ empty and unknown are different verdicts

empty = a fully-paged, all-Fabric inventory returned zero items. unknown = coverage could not be proven. Only empty (plus inactive + unassigned) is ever a deletion candidate. An unknown workspace reported as empty is exactly how a live workspace gets deleted.

Inactive workspaces (no activity) — expensive, and easy to get wrong

GET /v1.0/myorg/admin/activityevents (Power BI audience) returns WorkspaceId, Operation, UserId, CreationTime.

$d = (Get-Date).AddDays(-1).ToString('yyyy-MM-dd')
$u = "https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/admin/activityevents?startDateTime='${d}T00:00:00'&endDateTime='${d}T23:59:59'"
$r = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $u -Headers @{Authorization="Bearer $pbiToken"}
$ev = @($r.activityEventEntities)
while ($r.continuationUri) { $r = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $r.continuationUri -Headers @{Authorization="Bearer $pbiToken"}; $ev += @($r.activityEventEntities) }

API constraints — all four change how you must scope the question:

  1. One day per call. A multi-day range is rejected, not truncated. A 28-day look-back is 28 paginated calls.

  2. Retention is ~28 days. -27 days succeeded; -28 and beyond were rejected. You cannot answer "unused for 90 days" with this API. Say so rather than substituting a shorter window silently.

  3. Volume is large. A single day can return hundreds of thousands of events. Budget for pagination, not a single request.

  4. Absence of events is not proof of disuse. The window is short and only covers audited operations.

⚠️ Never call a workspace inactive from a one-day sample

Most workspaces show no activity on any given day — that does not make them unused. A one-day window mislabels the majority of the tenant as unused, confidently and wrongly.

Use the full available window (~28 days) or report no inactivity finding at all. If the cost is not acceptable, report the empty-workspace count and state explicitly that inactivity was not assessed.

Reporting

Report empty and inactive as separate lines, then intersect them:

  • Empty + inactive + unassigned — the only combination that is a genuine deletion candidate.

  • Empty + recent activity — a new or transient workspace. Not a finding.

  • Has items + inactive — possible abandonment, but check freshness (see Data freshness (refresh state)) before saying so; a certified, never-changing reference dataset is supposed to look inactive.

Deletion is never an automatic recommendation. Surface candidates for a human decision.

⚠️ Check dependencies before proposing removal — and never unassign silently

A workspace empty of items can still be a dependency of something else: assigned to a deployment pipeline stage, targeted by shortcuts, or bound to a capacity or domain. Treat those assignments as separate findings, report them alongside the deletion candidate, and never unassign or delete a pipeline assignment (or any dependency) without explicit confirmation. Emptiness is a fact about item count; it says nothing about what points at the workspace.


Find Workspace Admin Gaps (Bus Factor and Policy Thresholds)

Domain ownership (above) and workspace ownership are different checks against different endpoints. A tenant can have perfectly owned domains and still have thousands of single-admin workspaces.

Getting workspace roles

Two paths — the choice matters at tenant scale:

PathEndpointReturnsCost
Per-workspaceGET /v1/admin/workspaces/{id}/usersprincipal{id,displayName,type}, workspaceAccessDetails.workspaceRoleOne call per workspace — do not do this tenant-wide
Bulk (preferred)POST /v1.0/myorg/admin/workspaces/getInfo?getArtifactUsers=Trueusers[] with groupUserAccessRight, principalType, graphId, emailAddress~1 scan per 100 workspaces

Use the per-workspace call only to drill into a specific finding. The bulk path uses the same async 3-call scan flow as Labels, descriptions, and endorsement, so fetch users and curation metadata in the same scan rather than scanning twice.

Role values differ between the two APIs — workspaceRole (Admin/Member/Contributor/Viewer) vs. groupUserAccessRight (same values). Normalise before comparing.

⚠️ "Workspace with no admin" is the wrong thing to look for

Fabric will not leave a workspace adminless, so a zero-admin check reliably returns nothing and creates false confidence that ownership was assessed.

The real finding is not absent ownership, it is concentrated ownership — in most tenants a large share of workspaces have a single admin, leaving them one departure away from being orphaned. Lead with that.

Gaps to report

Report each with priority (blast radius × compounding signals) and effort (can a tenant admin fix it, or must it be escalated?). Workspace-role gaps are not admin-fixable at scale — see the warning below.

GapTestWhy it mattersPriorityEffort
Single admin (bus factor)Admin count == 1The dominant real-world risk — typically the largest ownership gap in a tenant.High — one departure from an orphaned workspaceEscalate — not admin-fixable. No admin-scoped write for workspace roles; each needs a workspace admin to act, or a portal takeover
No human adminZero admins of principalType == 'User'The true analogue of "ownerless": administered only by a service principal or group — invisible to a plain admin count, which reports it as owned.High — no accountable person at allEscalate — same constraint; add a human admin via a workspace admin/portal
Policy threshold violationAdmin count < N (tenant policy, e.g. N = 2)Configurable. Always print the threshold you applied.Medium–High (depends on N)Escalate at scale — one ask per workspace admin
Zero adminsAdmin count == 0Does not normally occur. If it ever does, treat as a critical anomaly, not a routine gap.Critical if ever seenInvestigate as an anomaly — not a routine remediation

Clean/pass: if the tenant's admin distribution meets the policy threshold, say so explicitly — e.g. "all workspaces have ≥ 2 admins — no bus-factor remediation needed."

⚠️ This finding cannot be remediated at scale — say so when you report it

There is no admin-scoped write for workspace roles. POST /v1/admin/workspaces/{id}/roleAssignments returns 404 (the admin route is read-only), and the core write route returns 403 to a tenant admin because it requires the workspace Admin role.

So a tenant admin can find single-admin workspaces and fix none of them directly. Remediation means asking each workspace admin to act, or taking over workspaces in the portal — an auditable permission change, not a silent cleanup. Report the finding with that constraint attached, or you hand someone a long list with no viable action.

⚠️ Group admins break naive counting — state this caveat

A security group counts as one principal but may contain many people.

  • A workspace with one group admin containing 10 people is not a bus-factor risk, but a principal count reports it as 1.

  • The reverse also holds: a group with one member reports as 1 and is a risk.

The admin APIs return the group principal, not its membership — resolving it requires Microsoft Graph, which is outside this skill. Therefore:

When any admin is a Group, report the workspace as "1 admin (group — membership not resolved)" rather than asserting a bus-factor risk. Give the count and its uncertainty. Reporting single-admin workspaces without noting that some are group-backed overstates the finding.

Count ServicePrincipal / App admins separately too: they satisfy a >= 2 policy numerically while adding no human accountability. A policy check that counts SPNs toward the threshold can be passed by automation alone.


Gotchas — Workspace Health

SymptomCauseFix
Workspace list is far shorter than the portal / undercounts the tenantUsed the user-scoped Core GET /v1/workspaces — returns only workspaces the admin has a role on.Use GET /v1/admin/workspaces?type=Workspace&state=Active; only fall back to Core on a 403, and label that result as user-scoped.
Answer doesn't say whether it's tenant-wide or "my" workspacesScope was left implicit; an admin expects tenant scope by default.State endpoint + scope up front (tenant-wide, Admin API).
Recommending deletion because a workspace has 0 itemsEmpty is not unused — an empty workspace can have activity the same day.Check activity before ever suggesting deletion.
"Unused workspace" report based on 1 day of activity eventsMost workspaces show no activity on any single day — a 1-day window mislabels the majority of the tenant.Use the full ~28-day window, or report no inactivity finding.
activityevents returns an error for a multi-day rangeOne day per call, by design. Multi-day ranges are rejected, not truncated.Loop day by day.
"Unused for the last 90 days" cannot be answeredRetention is ~28 days (-27 OK, -28 rejected).Say the window is unavailable rather than silently answering for a shorter period.
Zero-admin workspace check returns nothingExpected. Fabric does not leave workspaces adminless.Report single-admin and no-human-admin instead.
Admin count of 1 reported as bus-factor riskA Group admin may contain many people; membership is not resolvable from these APIs.Check principalType first; report "1 admin (group — membership not resolved)".
Workspace passes a >= 2 admin policy but has no human ownerService principals count numerically toward the threshold.Count human admins separately.
Calling /v1/admin/workspaces/{id}/users for every workspaceOne call per workspace — does not scale tenant-wide.Use the scanner API (getInfo?getArtifactUsers=True) — 100 workspaces per scan — and combine it with the curation-metadata scan.
Emptiness verdict came from the Power BI scanner / getInfo scanThose enumerate Power BI artifacts only — Fabric items (lakehouses, notebooks, pipelines, KQL DBs, …) are invisible to them, so populated workspaces look empty.Determine emptiness only from a fully-paged all-Fabric /v1/admin/items inventory.
Populated workspace reported as emptyThe /v1/admin/items response was not paged to exhaustion — a truncated first page drops items.Follow each response's continuationUri to the end before trusting a zero count; otherwise report coverage unknown, not empty.
Empty workspace deleted despite being in use elsewhereIt was assigned to a deployment pipeline stage or another dependency; item count says nothing about what references it.Report dependencies as separate findings; never unassign/delete without explicit confirmation.

Requirements and compatibility

Works with: Claude Code, Claude apps, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Kiro, OpenCode, Goose, Amp, Roo Code, JetBrains Junie, Factory Droid, Devin (ex-Windsurf), Mistral Vibe, OpenHands, Letta

“Works with” means the tool reads the open Agent Skills format; a skill written for one tool may use features others lack.

Security

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Attribution and licence

Published by
Microsoft
Publisher
Microsoft (Official)
Source
microsoft/skills-for-fabric · skills/onelake-catalog-cli · commit f8fac11
Licence
MIT License (redistribution allowed)
  • LICENSE (added by AutoGineer from LICENSE)
  • ATTRIBUTION.md (written by AutoGineer)
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