Welcome to episode 381 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro Podcast, recorded live on July 26, 2024. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of IT pros and end users, where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. Today, we have some updates to an older, but not often shared feature of Microsoft 365.
So without further ado, we bring you an introduction to Microsoft Graph Data Connect as well as some recent announcements about data that is accessible via the service. We are live with another episode of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on Friday, July 26th in the middle of a thunderstorm in Florida because it's Florida, and it's afternoon. It is starting to sound eerily ominous out there, and we are into thunderstorms in the afternoon season. So if I drop out, it's probably
not you. The thunderstorm? It's me. And my awesome my awesome access to electricity over here on the beach side of town. I just want the thunderstorms to pass so I can go play pickleball tonight. Oh, you're really dating yourself if you're if you're if you've already started playing pickleball. My my parents play pickleball, Ben. Pickleball pickleball is not for the youth like us. You know what? You say that, but it's better than not doing anything, I figure, and
I actually do kind of enjoy it. Alright. It's kinda fun. I can't play tennis. It's so for me, I can't play tennis. I love ping pong, but, look, I mean, I don't get to work out playing ping pong, and ping pong takes room indoors. So pickleball is, like, a happy medium between for me, where I can still carry over some of my ping pong abilities and get some exercise at the same time. If you find that it's that much fun call me old. You might have to invite
me. I mean, I have I have all the gray hair, so, you know, if it does end up being, like, an old person contingent thing, you just pull me along, and I'll I'll come play pickleball with you. I think we have all the stuff in the garage. My my my kids have a pickleball set that they bought to play pickleball with their grandparents. See, and you were just telling me I was dating myself by playing pickleball,
but, yeah, your kids play pickleball. No. I said, we have a pickleball set in the garage that was bought so my kids could play pickleball with their grandparents. I didn't say that my kids actually were playing pickleball with their grandparents or that that set was being used at all. Oh, okay. I stand corrected then. So speaking of buying other things, I spent more money today. Did you see did you get a chance to watch the YouTube video I sent you? Yeah. Elgato's got some new stuff out.
So they have a new XLR interface and a new USB hub, so I'm interested. What did you pick up? We have all our podcasts set up, so I was like, I do not need an XLR audio interface. However, if you do podcasts or have an XLR mic and you just need like a single XLR port, that is super intriguing and interesting to be able to incorporate an XLR audio interface straight into the Stream Deck. I picked up
the USB 1. So for me, it was, what, I think it's like $59 for the USB add on, and you essentially, like, unscrew the base of the Stream Deck Plus and then pop this attachment on the back and screw it back in, and it has 2 USB C ports, 2 USB 3 ports, and it actually has, like, an SD card reader and all of that. And here's my use case. I have 2 Stream Decks. I have, like, a USB
speakerphone on my desk. I charge my keyboard sometimes off of USB, and I have all these cables, like, running back and around up to docks hidden under my desk, behind my monitor, all of that.
But there are times I, like, just want to plug a USB device in that's right here on my desk, so I can minimize my USB cables running and snaking all around the desk and get myself a couple USB ports easily accessible, like right in front of me on the desk without adding something extra to the desk because they just kinda hide right in the back of the Stream Deck there. You'll have to tell me how this one works out for
you. Like, one of my frustrations with the Stream Decks is, you know, they're they're bound to the software on your desktop. So you end up, you know, in these kinda mismatched state areas where sometimes, like, the button on your Stream Deck thinks it's on when the device really isn't on over here, like, the software is not reporting things correctly. So one of the things that I do with my Stream Deck at least once a day is I unplug it, and I plug it back in. And I just do that by taking the USB
cable. So out the back. So one of the things so these new devices, I think they were only applicable to the Stream Deck Plus, which is fine. Like, that's what I have. But the way they also plugged in was basically having, like, a permanent USB, not cable, but just a plug sticking out on the mount device, And then you're basically
mounting straight on top of that. So I don't know if I wanna go from just pulling a cable out once a day to pulling the whole thing off the mount or potentially figuring out how to, like, pull the cable from the cable kind of thing depending on where it is. So I'd be interested in feedback once you've had a chance to play with it a little bit. And even on, like, the XLR interface, like, I look around a lot, and I'm like, you know, I drive 2
mics most of the day. So for my meetings, when I'm at work, I typically drive a shotgun mic. So to give folks a sense, so if I come over here, this is normally the microphone that I use on Teams calls and things like that just so I can be hands free and not have this big honking mic sitting in front of my face. But then when you and I do these things, you know, I I I bring the the the nice ESOS out and and pull that over for some of that, like, rich deep, you know, broadcasty goodness.
And so I I really like, I I only need 2 XLR interfaces, and I could probably get by with 1. Like, there's really no reason that I couldn't just use 1 and and be done with it. And it would buy back a bunch of space on my desk. So the cool thing about these, by kind of combining the functionality of a USB hub or the XLR thing, it's so stupid. It's completely low hanging fruit, but it makes a 100% of sense. Like, in your use case and in mine, it'd be buying back
desk space. Right? Like, if I could get rid of this honking device next to me that's driving, like, 4 XLR interfaces when I only need to, that actually wouldn't be too bad. So so that's the nice part. The bad part is you're doing everything in software, and then you have to contend with Elgato software, which isn't the most robust stuff from what I've seen. So trade offs continue to abound in technology land.
Yeah. I'll have to let you know. So I'm curious, like, for your use case of unplugging USB and plugging it back in, I think you would still do that. You would just unplug it from the USB hub instead of the back of the device because it looks like the cable just plugs into the USB hub, and then there's, like, a pass through into the stream deck for Yep. Connecting that. So I think it's still but then you disconnect
every USB device. That's the rub. Right? Like, so today, I'm only unplugging the Stream Deck, but if I have a bunch of other stuff plugged in there, like, let me see. What else do I have USB? Oh, my my mouse, my keyboard, like the little, you know, the 2.4 gigahertz dongles for those hang off a USB hub. Yeah. So I I wouldn't wanna lose, like, my mouse and my keyboard and everything while I'm waiting for the whole hub to go through its machinations and rebooting and all that stuff. So we'll see.
I'd be I'd be interested in the feedback on stability specifically. I will let you know. I might not be a good test because, ironically, I do not have the same issue you do around stuff getting out of sync. So this is would be another curious thing as to why that is. It's either sync or it just straight up freezes. Like, my stream deck my stream deck freezes all the time. I cannot remember the last time I have unplugged and replugged in my stream deck. It just keeps working for me.
You're living a magical world, my friend, every single day. Apparently. But that being said, I will and I'm curious if this works for you if if you've tried it. What I do have to do every once in a while because this to your point, it kinda streams through the software, is my software loses its connection back to, like, my Philips Hue or it loses my connection to my companion app or my Govee app, and I don't unplug
and replay in the device. I just kill the Stream Deck software and reopen it, and it reconnects everything back up and starts working. I've become a ninja killing the back end daemons for Stream Deck, particularly on, like, Mac OS. So, like, I drive a lot of my automations either through HomeKit or through Home Assistant, like, we've talked about both of those in the past.
So there's a specific daemon that runs for the Home Assistant plug ins, so you don't actually have to kill your whole Stream Deck. You just have to kill the Home Assistant 1, and then it magically kinda comes back. But, yeah, I I have a whole, like, I have a whole script I run on the side. Like, just go run this bash file, and that that kills everything and then brings it back to where it needs to be. Nice. Unless it was CrowdStrike, in which case there is no coming back. Another topic, another
day. There's coming back from CrowdStrike. It just involves 20 reboots and a USB key and, a whole bunch of extra steps Manually touching every device and if you are a cloud hosted virtual machine. Yes. We could talk about that, but it truth be told, it I mean, it a pet impacted Azure. It didn't really impact Microsoft 365. It was more Windows. We have other topics, Scott. Maybe we should Mabel would come back and talk about Crowd Strike. Did the Crowd Strike impact Azure?
So there was an Azure outage, which doesn't tie to the CrowdStrike outage. They were unfortunately, like, within, like, minutes of each other, like, 20 minutes or something like that. Yes. But completely unrelated. And I did like, I legitimately felt bad for Microsoft because I was reading some of these news articles, and you were getting these companies like, this is my pet peeve with the media.
I get why people do it, but they're always want to be first, and they always wanna have the breaking news, they always wanna have the most information. But that inherently, I feel like leads to them getting stuff really wrong sometimes. And in this case, I read so many articles where it was like, CrowdStrike outage takes down Azure and Microsoft 365, and I'm like, no. Microsoft 360 5 and Azure went down, like, the day before due to another issue. And from what I read, those 2 were
somewhat related. But then the whole CrowdStrike thing, like you said, very unfortunate timing happened right after Azure and Microsoft 365 got came back up. And so many news companies munged the 2 together when the CrowdStrike thing really was not Microsoft's fault at all. So the PIR post incident review for the US central outage
is up and out there. I'll I'll I'll see if I can pull it up for folks and at least include it in the show notes or I will post it over to Discord where if folks want to become members of the show because Ben told me I should talk about membership or, Hey. Become a member. You'd ask us access to Discord. Come and join us while we record these shows live, and follow along and chat with us and generally have fun. How was that? Was was my spiel good
there? You did good. Good job, Scott. So that being said, should we talk about our topic today? This is like an old one that has some new updates. I mean, that's pretty much what we're good at, right, is talking about old ones. That's Right. Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
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Talking about old stuff that resurfaced, so this is an article that I saw published on July 11, and it brought back memories and we started digging into it, was there was a post from Jose Barreto, that's probably how you pronounce his name, in tech community about updates on the SharePoint files dataset. And I was like, the SharePoint files dataset from the headline, I couldn't remember what it was. And then I started reading it, and it's under the subcategory of Microsoft Graph Data Connect
for SharePoint. And if you go start looking into this, this ties back to a feature that came out. I think it was originally announced. I had the YouTube video here, and then I lost it. 2021, I believe, like, 3 years ago, around this Microsoft Graph Data Connect and allowing you to essentially go in and grab a bunch of analytics data out of your tenant around various metrics.
And some of the metrics from back in 2021 when this was originally announced was being able to go in and pull datasets around users, direct reports, and managers from like an Office 365 people perspective, and then they had it for Exchange Online being able to pull in datasets around calendars, events, messages, contacts, mail folders, mailbox settings, sent items, and then they announced that Teams chats would be coming.
And I feel like when they originally announced this back in 2021, they, like, it just I I don't re remember hearing much about it over the last 3 years. And then this article popped up with 3 updates to it with some public availability for these updates coming here in the coming months up here in August. So this is kinda it's an interesting feature, and I don't I'll be honest, I don't
know where to start. Do we wanna start with the updates, or do we wanna kinda start with, like, what is the Microsoft Graph Data Connect? Like, what you would use this for? We should go back, and we should definitely start this one with, what is this? And it took me more than a hot minute to wrap my head around what this is and the value of this and and kind of I I think where it can inflict value on customer workloads, and I I I I kind of love features that inflict value.
And this was definitely one of those that does this, but it's kinda so confusing with the way it's marketed and it's put together. So give me your pitch for it and your understanding. And then if that matches with mine, we're good. But if not, I'll I'll give you a kind of some of my take and where I think this actually sits and why I think it's
kinda cool and maybe underappreciated. Like, I'm surprised I don't hear about it more based on what I learned about it after you pointed it out to me, and then spent a week researching it and clicking buttons and playing around. Okay. So here's my take on it. Microsoft Graph has I mean, Microsoft Graph is the underlying it's not really the underlying data. It's the underlying API, essentially, for all things Microsoft 365.
Like, when you go write different connectors, when you're going and writing custom code, when you're doing stuff in Power Apps, when you're doing stuff in PowerShell, ultimately you're connecting to Microsoft Graph for performing certain actions. The way I understand Microsoft Graph Data Connect is all these APIs also surface different things, and they have a whole list of different activities that are in micros in the Microsoft
Graph data. And my understanding is is that this is probably where a lot of the reports come from when you are looking at reports on Microsoft 365 or storage trends, around mailbox reports, emails sent, emails received, all of that. It's coming from Microsoft Graph. What Microsoft Graph Data Connect does is, by nature, all of that data has a time frame. Microsoft does not let you keep that data forever. They have to store it somewhere. Understandably,
it's going to have a lifespan. Usually, it's somewhere between 30 90 days.
What Microsoft Graph Data Connect does is allow you to go set up a connector to these datasets in the Microsoft Graph and essentially extract that data to whatever storage location you want to, and it's coming through something like Azure Synapse or Azure Data Factory where you go connect to Graph, pull this data through one of those, shove it off into some location where now you control the location so you can keep this data as long as you want to, but you also have all these
different data sets and activities that you can now build your own reporting, your own dashboards, view trends, all of that off of all these different activities and data that is surfaced through Microsoft Graph via this Microsoft Data Connect functionality feature, whatever you wanna call it. So that is my not necessarily a 32nd synopsis, but my understanding and rough how I would kind of describe what it is. I think you mostly
nailed it as far as my understanding. I I I would extend on a couple things. So this is called Microsoft Graph Data Connect, and then it has all these datasets that come from services that support the Graph, Exchange, SharePoint, all this stuff. Well, it has Graph in the name. The nice thing about it, and I'm gonna say this is a nice thing, is it allows you to not have to work with the graph APIs directly. Right? There is no
invoke web request. There is no going out and figuring out, am I using the beta endpoint versus the current GA endpoint? Which version of which PowerShell module do I use, and how much jankiness is there, like, any of that stuff. Like, the these are effectively snapshots of telemetry from the system that are pre aggregated and then pushed out on a schedule.
And the the the cool thing here is they're not only aggregated and pushed out on a schedule, they're pushed out in a format that's consumable and with a defined schema that has a hard contract against it. So each one of these datasets, like the Outlook dataset versus the SharePoint dataset versus, you know, some of the identity ones, they have hard schemas that are associated with them where you can choose as a customer to consume the entire schema or to only consume
portions of that schema. Right. So let's say you had a table with, you know, 50 columns in it based on the schema. And it turns out you only really need 10 of those. Great. You only take 10 of those, and that's what you get in your snapshot. And that's the data that's kinda dumped out continuously to get things going. So I I actually, like, I I looked at this, and I was like, why don't more services do this? It kinda makes sense if you think about it because Oh, 100%.
You don't always need near real time extracts or data flows. And in a world where you don't require near real time things, near real time aggregation, transformation, all those things, like, it's expensive. It's it's a ton of telemetry to store. It's a ton of telemetry to aggregate together. Quite often, it's on, like, you as the customer to put it together. Alright? So if I was gonna take, like, Azure Resources as an example let's say we took virtual machines,
and and we imagine something like that. Right? Like, so I have VM 1 and VM 2. VM 1 and VM 2 can both emit their telemetry, but I still need to rationalize which telemetry is from which one. How do I put it together? What are the right aggregates that I need to get to? Versus having something like this, say virtual machines was part of this data connect mechanism. You would just get one big dump daily or on your schedule of, hey, here's all
your VM information as you wanted it. And that's basically what this is doing for these various datasets that sit out there. So if you're looking at more, like, long term reporting scenarios, and long term is really, like, honestly, anything past, like, a couple minutes, because, you know, at that point, like, once you're outside of a a couple minutes to a handful of hours, like, you're not doing real time data
anyway. Like, figure out a way to snap to, like, a daily process or a weekly process or something like that, and then just track general trends and how those things go over time. And then maybe fill the gap with, like, some NRT stuff where you actually need it, maybe with, like, searching audit logs or real time metrics or or things like that along the way. So so it it's really cool because, like you said, for me, 1, you don't have to deal with the jank that is the
Graph API. And let's be honest, the Graph API is pretty darn janky and continues to be. And it gives you this fixed, durable contract that then you can go ahead and proceed forward with. You don't need to be a developer, you know, like, hands on, slinging code against things. Like, it all comes out in common formats, and you can just wire that up immediately to a Synapse solution if you wanted to do some further aggregates on top of it with, like, Spark or something like that, stand up
a Databricks cluster. Great. Or just pound point Power BI at that folder in a storage account and let it go. It's fascinating, and I don't know if you watched, I'm assuming in your studying too, you watched this video, and even back then they talked about, 1, not needing all the tables because columns in the table, all of the fields in the datasets, but also from a privacy perspective. They were like, if you want to run analytics on certain things, email, for example, it contained the email body
in the dataset. But if you wanna filter out the email body, you can filter out the email body or filter out email subjects and just see, like, who's sending an email to who or whom is sending it to whom. When are when are we supposed to use who and whom? Neither here nor there. And filtering out users and groups. So maybe you're only pulling in telemetry from certain groups of users or you're excluding certain users from your telemetry, but a lot of flexibility there. And this was
one. I'll pop this on the screen. We can throw an image in the show notes or something. But, like, this Power BI report, I've never seen this before, and I'm like, this is fascinating, where it's a super zoomed out, it's a it's showing like a graph of all the different users in a company with different bubbles in terms of emails that they've sent, but then connections of, like, who is emailing who within your organization.
And they use this example as they could see like the HR department was emailing everybody else but wasn't ever emailing anybody else in the company and developing graphs of how different people were connecting, when they were emailing people, who they were emailing, how different departments were collaborating or not collaborating together, just fascinating analytics that you can pull out of this without necessarily, I mean, again, you wouldn't have to know
what they're emailing. It's just the fact that emails are going from one person to other people. So, yeah, it's again, I remember this coming out. I started playing with it. This makes me wanna go play with it a whole lot more. Yeah. I it's it's it's an interesting one. I I also like that, like, the so so beyond, like, just, like, the generic, like, hey, it's a fixed contract and allows you to do reporting kind of your way with your tooling, things like that. It's also pretty agnostic.
Like, the datasets, they just publish out to storage accounts, like you said, so super easy to kinda pick them up and play with them once they're in there. Open format, queryable, you can get out of them with ADF, you can get them out at them with Synapse, you can get out of them with Databricks, like, tons and tons of options just to make your life, a little bit a little little bit easier. So, yeah, it's the the the pricing actually is isn't too bad either.
Like, I I guess we should call out, like, hey, like many things, this is an additive service. There is pricing. Yeah. Yeah. There there there are some considerations there for you just as, you know, how things marry up and ultimately come together. So, you know, you could be charged, and this could be a little hard to rationalize, Like, you'd be charged for storage consumption. You're gonna be charged for your usage based on the the the Graph Data Connect stuff.
And then some of these, like, they have one off pricing. So, like, you opened with the update on, like, the SharePoint stuff. So the SharePoint files dataset has a different pricing construct than other parts of Graph Data Connect, which can be a little bit confusing as well. So, you know, you're you're looking at things like everything is based on number of objects copied and number of objects copy number of objects enumerated on one side and sent into, ultimately, like, the dataset before it's
pumped out, blah blah blah. So you're talking about things like 0.35¢ to, 0.75¢, like, per n object, like, n 1,000 objects loaded into things along the way. So I I I think, like, you know, I was, like, seeing things like this too. Like, you're also seeing a little bit of, like, the bifurcation and potentially, like, the associated cost on the service side to pull this stuff out. Like, you mentioned logging is expensive. It's not just expensive for customers.
It's it's expensive for service providers as well, right, to generate and store and and put it all together. So so you do see some of that reflected kind of in the in in the pricing components as well. There is some chat going on in Discord asking about, like, is some of this pulling
into Veeva? Yeah. This is probably also where they're getting some of the Veeva Insights stuff, but they were also asking about in-depth analysis of SharePoint online environments, and I think that gets into a little bit of what this announcement was was kind of three announcements that came out here a couple weeks ago is datasets for SharePoint, and the SharePoint file datasets are gonna be publicly available on August 20, 2024, so another month or so from now.
They released the SharePoint files dataset pricing, And like you said, Scott, it's slightly different. And then the SharePoint files private preview extended to August 19, 2024, which makes sense. I essentially said private preview is gonna go right up until the GA date. So I don't
know if private preview was before that. But kind of what you're getting now in this dataset, and this is where you get some of this updated information, and I think this is some of the stuff you're also seeing if you've looked at SharePoint Premium and some of the oversharing analytics and some of that is these updated datasets now for SharePoint files allow you to pull in, like, archive state of the site, you can pull in things like Recyco bin item counts, you can pull in
communication sites, you can pull in if the site is a OneDrive site, if external sharing is enabled or not on the site, if the site is connected to a private Microsoft 365 group, privacy of the site, owners, last access data, and then you can pull in SharePoint permission datasets where it's total users, who something's created by, who an object is shared with based on the Azure AD object ID, how many users that's shared with, so a user count of how many files a or how many users a SharePoint
file is shared with. So a bunch of additional data was added to the SharePoint datasets, that you can now start going in and pulling in once it becomes generally available here in another month. And, again, some of these are especially around the shared with type of analytics can help you with some of that oversharing that has become ever so popular to talk about with the, increasing demand for Copilot or even just general security. It's more like back to kind of what I was thinking
earlier with just call it out again. So you have the kind of the the long term trending things that you wanna do. Like, this this all lends itself to trend analysis at scale within your environment. Like, it's definitely for the more, like, reactive stuff or maybe, like, more long term proactive. Like, I wanna track consumption of I I wanna track consumed size in my SharePoint sites versus, like, provision
size and then, you know, track that. I wanna track number of users, number of share requests, blah blah blah, different user types. Like, maybe you're trying to make a transition from, like, old school SPNs over to, like, MSIs. Right? And and and do that kind of burn down and track that. So it's all, like, very well
suited for that. It's also well suited for working around any of the limitations in the Graph API, where it just can't keep up with the polling rate, or you're just in such, like, a high churn environment that, you're gonna be subject to, like, API throttles or a bunch of other things that you don't want. So I I don't know that it's, like, the end all be all, but it's definitely complementary.
Like, I could totally see having like, like, when I was looking at this, I could totally see having a dashboard that does something like tracking my identity consumption longer term and some of the dimensions around that and then having, like, a view in there that also ties into, you know, some of my more, like, proactive, real timey reports, like risky sign ins and things like that. And then you can merge all that together in a single view, a single report, a
single world. Like, really cool stuff for being able to report just kinda, like, line of business or rhythm of business metrics around your consumption of these services that ultimately, like, have some hook or some data's data point into graph land. Yeah. And that was my thought with this because I've had clients come to me and say, okay. We have all these SharePoint sites. We have a 1000 SharePoint sites, 2,000 SharePoint sites, 3,000, whatever it may be,
especially around sharing. Who is this shared with? How many sites do I have that have external sharing links? How many are shared with guest users? Like, to write a PowerShell script to do that, 1, like you said, you're gonna hit throttles, but, 2, it just it's not fast to loop through 3,000 SharePoint sites and pull
that data. So to be able to dump this out and even provide regular reports every week, every month or so of how has that changed, what do we have out there, I see a lot of potential for this, especially around some of the SharePoint security. And I really do wanna go jump into some of the other datasets because there's a lot more datasets out there than I remember the last time I looked at this. Again, given that this has been around for a few years now. There's a whole
bunch. There's a whole git repo that's full of thumbs. So I I think the other thing, like, really, like, you should be screaming in the back of your head when you're sitting down and and you have to, like, rationalize, like, hey, do I use something like this or do I just use, like, in your case, like, PowerShell and things like that? It's also just durability. Like, you know, I know, like, we like to talk a lot about, like, API surfaces being contracts
and things like that. But the reality is, like, if you wrote a PowerShell script today that worked with the graph in its current instantiation, that that stuff could break, like, 5 minutes from now. Right? And then you're just left with the churn of having to figure that out and build it back to where it needs to be versus something like this where you can truly take a durable contract, like, hey. You're you're you're not only paying for the data, but, you know, it it's a fixed schema.
It's a known thing. So you can take a little bit of a firmer dependency on it, like, on the order of, like, months to years versus what sometimes, like, really like, I I know it comes across as me being flippant, but it does feel like minutes sometimes in graph land, which is the way stuff changes or moves from underneath you. Absolutely. And I guess kinda to wrap it up, unless you need anything else, if you are looking to get started with this, we will
throw this link in the share notes. And, again, I don't know how I missed this. This is a step by step, gather a detailed dataset on SharePoint sites using the Microsoft Graph Data Connector back from February of this year, where it does walk you step by step through setting up Microsoft Graph Data Connect, enabling the right features, services in Microsoft 365,
setting up Azure. I know some Microsoft 365 people, me included, maybe aren't super familiar with, I think, setting up like Synapse workspaces and how you would connect the data to Synapse and pull the data through, going through and building reports. Like, this is an end to end step by step walk through from turning the feature on to connecting it to Synapse to walking you through building a Power BI report.
It is a fairly lengthy web page, but I would say a very good place to get started if you're not familiar with some of this stuff, just to see a sample of how you can start building this stuff out. Yeah. I saw this one. So so it exists in docs as well, in like the public docs, just not with the verbosity. Uh-huh. And I really wondered like, why doesn't this sit in docs? Because and it was the piece that I was missing when I first started going through it
until you pointed out the article. It was like, hey, you you get to the end and, like, there's no good, like, how do you visualize all this stuff? Because ultimately, that's the point. Right? Like, we get to really decide, like, what's what's the consumption and distribution model look like, and is that Power BI? Is that Tableau? Is that Grafana? Like, who you know, whatever it happens to be. And then I was going through this article.
I was like, oh, it's just because they went down the happy path of, like, everything the most expensive way they could. Right? Like, synapse here, ADF here, this this this, all these things, and all these things, like so so it's a happy path. Like, I will give them that 100%. Like, it it's it's a happy path. It works. Like, I can tell you, like, if you go through that article, like, it'll lead you into some bad practices, you know, around the way, like app registrations
and things are configured. But whatever. Like, it works on the other side. Right? Like, it it does give you kinda, like, a point in time and get you where you need to be. But be mindful, like, as you're standing this stuff up, like, there might be other ways to do it. There could be less costly ways to do it. Right? Like, you might wanna consider, like, you know, do you really need Synapse?
If you do need Synapse, like, what's the size of your Synapse compute that you're gonna pull in versus what's the size that's maybe in, like, the random article on TechCommunity or things like that. So just just keep that stuff in mind too. But I'll I'll tell you, like, I I was actually quite impressed. Like, this is, like, kudos because it it was very turnkey and and very easy to get going with. Absolutely. So I already see Pirate in the chat.
He's like, you guys just filled up my weekend for me now. He's gonna be busy this this weekend playing with it as well. So very cool tool features that, like you said, I'm surprised it doesn't have it hasn't gotten more attention, visibility. So if you haven't seen it, played with it. It's probably worth a check checking it out and seeing what you can do, especially if you like numbers and reporting and analytics Absolutely. Or on Microsoft 365. It is for the data geeks. Get it get it going.
Alright. Well, thanks, Scott. Appreciate it. Glad we were able to nail it and be on the same page with what this actually is, and hopefully bring some clarity and some visibility to it for those of you that have not played with it. Yeah. But with that, go play with data this weekend. Pull in a bunch of data, create a bunch of reports, and show me what you created next week. Homework. There we go. I'm yeah. I wanna see screenshots in Discord next week. Blur them all out. They'll just be blurry
blobs of default Power BI colors. What we talked about, just abstract the data. Just mask usernames and all that and create some fun charts. Mhmm. We'll see what see what we can see in Discord beginning of next week. So hope everyone enjoys their weekend, and we will talk to you again soon, Scott. Great. Thanks, Ben. If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a 5 star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more IT pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure.
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