Onelake Catalog CLI
MicrosoftOfficialPublished by Microsoft
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- Automation and integrations
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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
Download the skill as a ZIP:
https://mp-staging.autogineer.com/agent-skills/microsoft/onelake-catalog-cli/downloadUnzip 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.comcall must carryx-ms-fabric-skill: onelake-catalog-cli(az rest:--headers "x-ms-fabric-skill=onelake-catalog-cli"), including every LRO poll,fabric_lroand retry. Snippets omit it — add it anyway.
CRITICAL NOTES
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(followcontinuationTokenonly if it isn't on the first page; details in COMMON-CLI.md § Finding Workspaces and Items in Fabric).To find an item's ID, one call: the same on
.../v1/workspaces/{ws}/items?type=<Type>with--query "value[?displayName=='<name>'] | [0].id".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.
The item list and Get Item both return an item's
tags. An item with no tags has notagsfield — 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
| Mode | Use when | Load | Writes |
|---|---|---|---|
| curate | An 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 items | references/curate.md | ✅ after the owner approves each suggestion |
| dataowner-audit | A 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-remediate | A 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 these | references/dataowner-remediate.md | ✅ self-service |
| admin-audit | A Fabric tenant admin wants tenant-wide governance posture (/v1/admin/*) | references/admin-audit.md; any tenant count starts from admin-audit-scope.md | ❌ |
| admin-remediate | A Fabric tenant admin makes tenant-wide writes — domains, bulk assignment, domain roles, bulk labels, tenant tag definitions, tenant settings | references/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 isadmin-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 loadsearch-consumption-clifor 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-auditcovers only workspaces the caller can access — say so up front rather than routing into anadmin-*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.
| Mode | Terminal write |
|---|---|
curate | PATCH /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-remediate | POST /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-audit | none — 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
| Write | Mode | Gate |
|---|---|---|
| Any curation write | curate | The 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 descriptions | curate | A 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 domain | admin | Check 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 definition | admin | Report how many items carry it first — deletion detaches it everywhere with no undo. |
| Bulk-assign workspaces to a domain | admin | Check each target's current domainId and warn before silently overriding an assignment. Dry-run the target list first. |
| Remove a principal from a domain role | admin | Confirm it will not leave the domain ownerless; name the principal being removed. |
| Bulk sensitivity-label change | admin | Dry-run: show the affected items and before/after label, get confirmation. No service principal / managed identity — the call will fail. |
| Write a tenant setting | admin | Read and show the current value, then the proposed value — tenant-wide blast radius. |
| Assign / unassign one workspace to a domain | dataowner | A 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) | dataowner | Assigns to the caller only; needs Write on the item and its children. Confirm the intended identity. |
| Assign a workspace to a capacity | dataowner | Needs workspace Admin plus capacity Contributor/Admin. 202 is not success — poll to a terminal state. |
| Apply / remove a workspace tag (preview) | dataowner | Needs 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 viacurl(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'sRetry-Afterasks (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_lroin 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
401or403is 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
202as 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
Curate — workflow, permission per change, preview format, examples, errors
Suggestion guidance — drafting descriptions, names and tags from content
Tag taxonomy — tenant/domain tag scope and name → ID resolution
Table metadata — table and column descriptions (OneLake table API, preview)
Curation API reference — Update Item, Apply/Unapply Tags, List Tags
Govern — shared
Govern pillars — the three pillars, what "good" looks like, reporting conventions
Governance data sources — verified API field coverage and blind spots
Governance roles — permission tiers, domain/workspace roles, insight refresh lag
Catalog concepts — the entity model and API-backed versus conceptual terms
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
- ATTRIBUTION.mdAdded by AutoGineer883 B
- LICENSELicence file added by AutoGineer1.1 KiB
- SKILL.md21.5 KiB
- apm.yml345 B
- references/admin-audit-assessment.md10.9 KiB
- references/admin-audit-scope.md5.7 KiB
- references/admin-audit.md14.9 KiB
- references/admin-audit/health-capacity.md7.3 KiB
- references/admin-audit/health-domains.md11.5 KiB
- references/admin-audit/health-item.md13.7 KiB
- references/admin-audit/health-workspaces.md15.4 KiB
- references/admin-audit/item-inventory.md9.1 KiB
- references/admin-audit/protect-labels-dlp.md1.4 KiB
- references/admin-audit/trust-curation.md2.8 KiB
- references/admin-remediate.md17.1 KiB
- references/admin-remediate/domain-assign-workspaces.md7.3 KiB
- references/admin-remediate/domain-crud.md10.5 KiB
- references/admin-remediate/domain-default-label.md2.6 KiB
- references/admin-remediate/domain-roles.md4.5 KiB
- references/admin-remediate/item-sensitivity-label.md2.6 KiB
- references/admin-remediate/no-write-api-escalation.md13.4 KiB
- references/admin-remediate/tags.md1.9 KiB
- references/admin-remediate/trust-curate.md3.4 KiB
- references/catalog-concepts.md7.2 KiB
- references/curate.md19.7 KiB
- references/curate/api-reference.md7.8 KiB
- references/curate/metadata-suggestion-guidance.md10.6 KiB
- references/curate/table-metadata.md9.9 KiB
- references/curate/tag-taxonomy.md3.1 KiB
- references/dataowner-audit.md14.4 KiB
- references/dataowner-audit/health-workspaces.md14.1 KiB
- references/dataowner-remediate.md15.0 KiB
- references/govern-data-sources.md7.9 KiB
- references/govern-pillars.md13.3 KiB
- references/govern-roles.md9.9 KiB
references/admin-audit/health-item.md
Item Health — Ownership, Item Identity and Staleness
Contents
Item Health (Ownership and Staleness)
Gotchas — Item Health
Read this when: Deciding who owns an item, whether it is abandoned, and whether it is still refreshing on schedule — without manufacturing false findings.
Part of the onelake-catalog-cli skill (admin-audit mode). Return to SKILL.md for scoping rules, blind spots and the full posture workflow.
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.
Item Health (Ownership and Staleness)
Two questions, both answerable from /v1/admin/items — but the ownership one has a trap that produces confident false accusations.
Item creator — coverage and the type lie
/v1/admin/items returns creatorPrincipal with {id, displayName, type, userDetails.userPrincipalName}.
Live-verified: 14,772 of 14,978 items (98.6%) carry a creator. The 206 without one were legacy Power BI types — Dashboard (141), App (27), plus a few Eventhouse/Eventstream/Report. Report these as "creator unknown", never as ownerless.
⚠️
creatorPrincipal.typeis always"User"— even for service principalsLive-verified: all 14,772 items reported
type: "User", yet resolving the 25 distinct creators against Microsoft Graph showed 9 were service principals (131 items).Do not trust
creatorPrincipal.type. It cannot distinguish a person from automation, so it cannot answer "does this item have a human owner?" on its own.Where
defaultIdentityexists (below), it reports the type correctly — use it in preference. Live-verified on 16 items: same principalid,creatorPrincipal.type: "User"butdefaultIdentity.type: "ServicePrincipal". That is the same principal described correctly by one field and incorrectly by the other.
Item Identity: the Effective Owner (Preview)
Fabric is replacing the implicit "item owner is whoever created it" dependency with an associated identity — defaultIdentity — so items stop breaking when a person leaves. (Learn)
This is the ownership field. creatorPrincipal is history — defaultIdentity is authority. Where both exist, report defaultIdentity.
Request it explicitly with include=defaultIdentity; it is omitted by default:
# Tenant-wide, one paginated sweep — live-verified, works on the admin route
az rest --method GET --resource "https://api.fabric.microsoft.com" \
--url "https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/v1/admin/items?include=defaultIdentity" \
| jq -r '.itemEntities[] | select(.defaultIdentity)
| [.type, .name, .defaultIdentity.type,
(.defaultIdentity.userDetails.userPrincipalName
// .defaultIdentity.servicePrincipalDetails.aadAppId)] | @tsv'Both tiers support it — live-verified: /v1/admin/items, /v1/admin/workspaces/{ws}/items/{id}, and the core /v1/workspaces/{ws}/items.
| Identity type | Contact field |
|---|---|
User | defaultIdentity.userDetails.userPrincipalName |
ServicePrincipal | defaultIdentity.servicePrincipalDetails.aadAppId (no human — escalate to workspace admins) |
⚠️ Coverage is 3.9% — do not report it as an ownership gap
Live-verified: 588 of 14,941 items carry a
defaultIdentity. The other 96% are not "missing an owner" — their item type does not support the feature yet. Reporting them as ownerless would manufacture ~14,000 false findings.Supported types observed live: Lakehouse (382), DataPipeline (107), Eventstream (49), Homeone (24), CopyJob (15), UserDataFunction (11).
Learn currently lists only Lakehouse and Eventstream — the live surface is already wider. Detect supported types by probing (
select(.defaultIdentity)), never from a hard-coded list, and re-check rather than trusting either source.
Two further cautions:
Divergence is the signal, and it is currently zero. In the verified tenant 0 of 588 items had a
defaultIdentitydiffering fromcreatorPrincipal— nobody has reassigned yet. So today it adds no new ownership information in this tenant; it becomes load-bearing the moment a takeover happens. Do not conclude the field is redundant.It is preview (
?beta=trueon the write path). Tag findings accordingly.
⚠️ Detecting departed owners — the trap that manufactures findings
The natural check — "creator no longer resolves in Entra ⇒ they left the org" — is wrong, and wrong in the direction that generates false positives.
Live-verified on 25 distinct creators:
| Method | Unresolvable | Reality |
|---|---|---|
getByIds with types: ['user'] | 11 principals / ~206 items | 9 were live service principals, not departed people |
getByIds with no type filter | 2 principals | A #EXT# guest (GitIntegration1) and a system principal (Admin Monitoring) |
Genuine departed-user orphans in the verified tenant: zero. The naive check reports eleven.
Mandatory procedure:
Check
defaultIdentityfirst. For the ~4% of items that have one, it answers the ownership question directly and correctly — including whether the owner is a service principal. Only fall through to creator-resolution for items without it.Resolve creators with
POST https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/directoryObjects/getByIdsand notypesfilter — the filter is what causes service principals to look like deleted users.Classify what came back by
@odata.type:#microsoft.graph.uservs.#microsoft.graph.servicePrincipal.Only a principal unresolvable without a type filter is a candidate.
Before reporting, exclude guest (
#EXT#) and system principals, then checkaccountEnabledon resolved users — a disabled account is a departure the directory still returns.Report survivors as "creator no longer resolvable — verify with IAM", never as "employee left the organisation."
Requires Microsoft Graph (Directory.Read.All). If Graph is unavailable, say ownership could not be assessed — do not substitute the unreliable type field.
Creator is not owner. The creator may have left while the workspace remains well-administered. Always report creator-orphaned items alongside the workspace's admin list (Find Workspace Admin Gaps). An item whose creator is gone but whose workspace has two active admins is not an ownership gap.
Semantic models expose a second, independent owner via configuredBy on GET /v1.0/myorg/admin/capacities/refreshables — useful for refresh ownership specifically.
Stale / unused items
lastUpdatedDate is the only per-item time signal /v1/admin/items returns.
jq -r --arg cut "$(date -u -d '180 days ago' +%Y-%m-%d)" \
'[.[] | select(.lastUpdatedDate < $cut)] | group_by(.type)
| map({type: .[0].type, stale: length}) | .[]' /tmp/all_items.jsonThree limits to state whenever you use it:
It records modification, not use. A certified reference dataset that is read daily and never edited looks stale. Cross-check with activity events before calling anything unused.
It is not a refresh timestamp. For semantic models use the refresh history API (see Data freshness (refresh state) below).
Thresholds are policy, not fact. Print the cut-off you applied and never delete on this signal alone.
Data freshness (refresh state)
Freshness is a Health signal in this skill. "Is this item actively refreshing?" is a data-estate/currency question, so it is audited here rather than under Trust. This is a deliberate divergence from the product's Govern tab, which lists data freshness under Discover, trust & reuse — see
govern-pillars.md§ Pillar 1.
lastUpdatedDate (above) is modification time, not refresh time — and the Power BI scanner API does not return refresh state either. For semantic models, use the Power BI refresh history API per model:
az rest --resource https://analysis.windows.net/powerbi/api \
--url "https://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/groups/{workspaceId}/datasets/{datasetId}/refreshes?\$top=1"Flag items whose latest refresh status != "Completed" or whose endTime is older than the expected cadence. Refresh ownership (who configured it) comes from configuredBy on GET /v1.0/myorg/admin/capacities/refreshables — pair it with the finding so it can be routed.
Cross-pillar (Health × Trust). Intersect the stale/failed-refresh set with the endorsed set (trust-curation.md) — a certified but stale item (authoritative content serving out-of-date data) is a higher-priority finding than either signal alone. Surface these first.
Reporting
Report each finding as finding → evidence → why it matters → recommended action → priority → effort, and rank by combination — any single signal is weak. ⚠️ Almost nothing here is admin-fixable: the tenant admin can find these but has no item write route (see the warning below), so effort is almost always "escalate".
Stale + creator unresolvable + workspace has one admin — the strongest orphan candidate. Priority: High. Effort: escalate — name the workspace admins/creator; the admin cannot delete or reassign it directly.
Stale + active workspace + multiple admins — likely a stable asset. Not a finding — report as clean/pass, not as a risk.
Creator is a service principal — report separately. Automation-created content has no human owner by design; it needs a documented owner, not an orphan flag. Priority: Low–Medium. Effort: escalate — assign a documented owner.
Has a
defaultIdentitypointing at a departed/disabled user — the highest-confidence ownership finding available, and the only one with a supported API fix. Priority: High. Effort: medium — route it to someone with Write on the item, who can reassign via the assign API (see remediate skill).Endorsed + stale/failed refresh — a Promoted/Certified item whose latest refresh failed or is past its cadence. The worst case in the estate: authoritative content serving out-of-date data. Priority: High. Effort: escalate — a refresh needs workspace/dataset rights, not tenant admin; a Fabric-native model has no refresh API at all (see remediate skill).
Clean/pass: when a checked signal is clean (e.g. "0 items with an unresolvable creator after excluding SPNs and guests"), say so explicitly so the reader knows ownership was assessed, not skipped.
⚠️ You are finding items you cannot delete
Live-verified: there is no admin-tier item write route (
DELETE /v1/admin/items/{id}→ 404), and the core route requires workspace Contributor or above — a tenant admin who is not a workspace member got 401 on evenGET /v1/workspaces/{id}/items.So never close a stale/unused item finding with "delete these." Every such finding must ship with who can act on it: the workspace admins (
GET /v1/admin/workspaces/{id}/users, filterworkspaceRole == "Admin"— includesuserPrincipalName) and the item creator. The remediate skill has the full procedure in § Route a Finding to Someone Who Can Fix It.Note also that
GET /v1/admin/items/{id}/usersreturns 404 — there is no per-item permission list at admin tier. Workspace access is the finest granularity you can report.
Gotchas — Item Health
| Symptom | Cause / verified reality | Fix |
|---|---|---|
Item creator shows type: "User" but is automation | creatorPrincipal.type is always User — 9 of 25 verified creators were service principals. | Resolve against Graph to determine the real type. |
| Items flagged as "owner left the organisation" | Almost certainly false. getByIds with types:['user'] produced 11 false positives vs. 0 real orphans. | Query without a type filter, then exclude SPNs, #EXT# guests and system principals. |
Items with no creatorPrincipal at all | 206 verified, nearly all legacy Dashboard/App. | Report as "creator unknown", not ownerless. |
| Reported stale/unused items as "delete these" | The tenant admin has no item delete route — DELETE /v1/admin/items/{id} is 404, and the core route needs workspace Contributor+ (401 for a non-member tenant admin). | Name the workspace admins and creator instead — see remediate § Route a Finding to Someone Who Can Fix It. |
GET /v1/admin/items/{id}/users returns 404 | The route does not exist — no per-item permission list at admin tier. | Use GET /v1/admin/workspaces/{id}/users and state you are reporting workspace access, not item access. |
defaultIdentity missing from every item | It is omitted by default. | Pass ?include=defaultIdentity. If still absent, the item type does not support item identity (only ~4% do) — that is not an ownership gap. |
| Reporting ~96% of items as "no owner assigned" | You treated absent defaultIdentity as a finding. Live-verified only 588 of 14,941 items support it. | Report coverage only across supported types, detected by probing for the field. |
creatorPrincipal.type and defaultIdentity.type disagree | defaultIdentity is right. Live-verified on 16 items: identical principal id, creator said User, identity said ServicePrincipal. | Always prefer defaultIdentity.type where present. |
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
No issues found by our static scan· No issues found
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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)
- Synced
- Also distributed in
- microsoft/skills-for-fabric
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