What MetaMiner Does¶
MetaMiner is a Windows server application that keeps a continuously updated copy of your Microsoft Fabric and Power BI tenant metadata in your own database and gives administrators tools to analyze, govern and protect that content.
How it works¶
MetaMiner does not replace the Fabric admin portal or the Power BI service. It reads your tenant through Microsoft's admin and Fabric REST APIs with a service principal you register, stores what it finds in the MetaMiner Database (MMDB), and works from that copy. Because it uses the tenant-level admin APIs, it sees every workspace, including personal workspaces, without being added to each one.
| You want to | MetaMiner gives you |
|---|---|
| Find any item fast | The Power BI Explorer in the client: every workspace with its reports, dashboards, semantic models, dataflows, apps and Fabric items, with filters and search |
| Know what breaks if a source changes | Impact analysis from data sources and semantic model tables to the reports and dashboards that use them |
| Know who can see what | Workspace and item access, a security matrix, and Entra users, groups and nested memberships |
| Change access without the portal | Manage Access: add, change or remove workspace access as yourself |
| Protect content | Scheduled backups of reports, semantic models, notebooks, pipelines and other Fabric items, and restore to the same or a new workspace |
| Recover a deleted workspace | Restore deleted workspaces from the client (Fabric administrators) |
| Understand usage and cost | Power BI Usage dashboards: activity, refreshes, content health, licensing waste and capacity utilization |
| Query the metadata yourself | Meta Query: SQL over the MetaMiner Database, with export |
What MetaMiner does not do¶
- It does not read the data rows inside your reports and semantic models. It reads their structure, expressions and lineage.
- It does not change anything in your tenant during the scheduled collection.
- It does not install an agent in your tenant or on your gateways.
Who uses it¶
| Role | Typical use |
|---|---|
| Fabric / Power BI administrator | Install and configure MetaMiner, monitor the tenant, manage workspace access, run backups |
| BI Center of Excellence lead | Usage, adoption and license reporting, content clean-up, migration planning |
| Security reviewer | Access review across workspaces, groups and users |
| Power user / developer | Search, impact analysis before changing a source or model |
Key terms¶
- Environment
- One Microsoft Entra tenant connected to MetaMiner through one registered application. Called a Power BI environment in the MetaMiner Administrator.
- Collection
- MetaMiner reading metadata from Microsoft into the MetaMiner Database. Each kind of data is collected by its own collector on its own schedule.
- MetaMiner Server (MMS)
- The Windows service that runs the collectors and serves the client, the administrator and the browser dashboards.
- MetaMiner Database (MMDB)
- The PostgreSQL database that holds the collected metadata. Power BI needs PostgreSQL 16 or later.
- MetaMiner Client (MMC)
- The desktop application users work in.
- MetaMiner Administrator (MMA)
- The desktop application that configures the server.
Image of the MetaMiner Client main window showing the Power BI Explorer tab with a workspace tree and the item list
../images/get-started/mmc-pbi-explorer-overview.png