article 23181

Useful Community Tools And Resources For Power BI And Fabric

There are a lot of really cool free, community-developed tools and resources out there for Power BI and Fabric – so many that it’s easy to miss announcements about them. In this post I thought I’d highlight a few that came out recently and which you might want to check out.

Let’s start with the Fabric Toolbox, a collection of tools, samples, scripts and accelerators created and maintained by some of my colleagues here at Microsoft. The most widely-known tool in there is FUAM (Fabric Unified Admin Monitoring), a solution accelerator for monitoring an enterprise Power BI and Fabric implementations. It’s the successor to Rui Romano’s Power BI monitoring solution, which is now deprecated, but it’s a lot richer than that. It’s already been the subject of a Guy In A Cube video though so I hope you’ve already come across it. There are other things in the Fabric Toolbox that should be more widely known though. My fellow CAT Phil Seamark (why doesn’t he blog anymore???) has been busy: a month ago he announced a new Power BI load testing tool (video here) based on Fabric notebooks which is much easier to configure than the previous load testing tool created by the CAT team. He’s also published a sample MCP Server that, among other things, can analyse a semantic model to see whether it follows best practices. Another colleague, Justin Martin, has published tools for auditing semantic models and DAX performance tuning in the toolbox too. Finally, with the deprecation of Power BI Datamarts looming, if you choose to replace them with Direct Lake semantic models based on Fabric Warehouse (although I think 90% of the Datamarts I’ve seen can be replaced with simple Import models) then there’s a migration accelerator here.

Elsewhere, if you’re a hardcore Power BI developer you’ll already know how useful TMDL View in Power BI Desktop is. Rui Romano recently announced that there’s a new gallery of TMDL scripts where you can see what’s possible with TMDL and share your own scripts. For example, there’s a script here that creates a date dimension table from a Power Query query.

Two years ago I blogged about a tool called PBI Inspector that provides rules-based best practices testing for the Power BI visualisation layer, created by yet another Microsoft colleague, Nat van Gulck. Not only is there now a V2 of PBI Inspector, which will be renamed Fab Inspector, but two weeks ago Nat announced a VS Code extension that allows you to write, debug and run rules from VS Code.

Last of all Gerhard Brueckl recently announced V2 of Fabric Studio, an incredibly powerful VS Code extension that acts as a wrapper for the Power BI/Fabric REST APIs. It lets you browse your workspaces and their contents from VS Code and create/update/delete items among other things; Gilbert Quevauvilliers recently wrote a nice blog post showing how you can use it to download any Power BI report from the Service easily.

That’s enough for now. If there are other tools or resources that came out recently that I didn’t mention, please leave a comment!