Getting started with Microsoft Purview dashboards

Microsoft Purview is an enterprise-scale platform for managing data governance across your whole cloud estate. It is not just about ensuring the integrity of data stored in SQL databases — it spans the whole spectrum of data storage including blob storage, document databases, email and AI frameworks.

It has an extensive list of features for organising and monitoring your enterprise data. This includes

• Classifications
• Scanning resources
• Lineage tracking
• Exfiltration detection
• and much more.

The complete Purview platform covers multiple logical concerns — rolling both security and governance into a single entity. As its name suggests, the SquaredUp Purview Governance data source concentrates on the governance aspect. In this article we will show you how you can use our Purview data source to connect to the Purview API and easily visualise Purview analytics across all of your domains.

Getting connected

Although Microsoft Purview is accessed as a platform in its own right, it is tightly integrated with Azure and you will need to create an Azure App Registration to connect. The App Registration will need to have the following permissions assigned to it in the Purview portal:

• Data Reader
• Data Source Administrator

In the Purview portal you can manage these permissions by navigating to:

Data Map → Collections → Root collection → Role assignments.

Out of the box dashboards

Once you have connected you will see that the data source has generated an out-of-the-box dashboard called Overview. As the name suggests, this displays some headline metrics and data to show the big picture for your Purview instance — this includes totals for the main entity types as well as a listing of data sources and a summary of classification coverage:

Data streams

In SquaredUp, data streams are a means of breaking down all the endpoints of a backend API into easy-to-navigate groupings. The SquaredUp Purview data source has the following groupings:

• Assets
• Classifications
• Collections
• Data Sources
• Governance Domains
• Policies

Visualising scans

Scans are the lifeblood of your Purview instance and probably one of your top priorities will be to track their health and performance. In the Purview data source, you can find data streams for scans in the Data Sources grouping. The Scans on Data Sources stream will show you details about scan definitions and the Scans History stream will show you the details of individual runs for a particular scan definition.

In the Purview API, scans are attached to specific Data Sources, so in the next step we will select the Data Source that contains our scan definition.

Once you have selected the Data Source you will see a dropdown list containing the Scans that have been defined for that Data Source. For my dashboard I want to use the Block visualisation so that I can see the health of recent scans at a glance. I also want to limit my view to the last 5 scans, as in the screenshot below:

Achieving this means crafting a custom SQL query. The great news is that you don’t need to know any SQL — SquaredUp’s AI-powered SmartAssist will do all the work. In the Filter/Group/Sort step just click on the SQL option and then click on the SmartAssist icon:

Now you can just enter a natural language query and SmartAssist will generate the SQL.

SmartAssist will produce a response like the one below. If you are happy with the output you can click on Apply to copy the text to the query editor and then hit Execute to run the query.

This gives you incredible power and flexibility in tailoring your data to meet your exact visualisation needs. If the results aren’t quite what you were expecting you can just ask SmartAssist to amend the query.

Alerting

Obviously, if a scan fails, we may need to alert relevant stakeholders. In SquaredUp, configuring notifications is super simple. When building our tile, we can just switch on the Monitoring toggle:

The monitor sees that our dataset has a Status column and automatically binds to this to evaluate the state of our scan:

Once our Monitor is enabled, we can define a notification. The Monitors page lists all Monitors that have been created for a particular Workspace. All we need to do is select our Purview Scan History Monitor as trigger for our Notification:

Then we select one or more recipients or channels for our notification.

As you can see, the notification can be much more than a simple text alert. You can also include a shared dashboard link as well as an image of the relevant dashboard tile to give recipients the full context for the alert.

A Low Code Plugin

The SquaredUp Purview data source is one of our new Low Code Plugins — this means that it is open source. You can access the code on our GitHub repo, update it to meet your own team’s needs and then share your changes with the SquaredUp community.

If you don’t have a SquaredUp account, you can sign up for our free forever tier and be visualising your Purview metrics within minutes.