Azure Weekly

Issue #536 - 19th October 2025

There are a raft of new announcements for Microsoft Fabric: Gain End-to-End Visibility into Data Activity Using OneLake diagnostics (GA) enables workspace administrators to track who accessed what data, when, and how across Fabric workspaces by streaming data access events as JSON logs into a Lakehouse for analysis. Job-Level Bursting Switch gives capacity administrators granular control over Spark compute resources, allowing them to optimize for either peak performance or higher concurrency by enabling or disabling the ability for individual jobs to consume burst capacity. 

Top Features of Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric highlights key capabilities including native lakehouse integration, built-in file system, Data Wrangler for drag-and-drop exploration, Copilot AI assistance, fast Spark startup times, and seamless Power BI semantic model integration through Semantic Link, and Building data quality into Microsoft Fabric advocates for a validation-first approach where data quality checks become first-class citizens in pipeline design, with validation occurring early and often at multiple checkpoints throughout the data lifecycle. Azure Synapse Runtime for Apache Spark 3.5 is now generally available for production workloads, featuring upgrades to Apache Spark 3.5 and Delta Lake 3.2 while helping customers prepare for migration to Microsoft Fabric Spark.

In AI, Building Human-in-the-loop AI Workflows with Microsoft Agent Framework demonstrates how Microsoft Agent Framework combines deterministic workflow orchestration with autonomous AI agents for fraud detection, using a fan-out/fan-in pattern with specialized agents, checkpointing, and human review capabilities. GitHub Copilot in SSMS (Preview) brings AI-powered assistance to SQL Server Management Studio in Preview 3 of SSMS 22, providing help with writing, editing, and fixing T-SQL queries with database and schema context awareness. Celebrate National Book Month with Copilot showcases creative ways to use Microsoft Copilot for literary activities, including fighting book bans, supporting independent bookstores, setting up Little Free Libraries, and overcoming writer's block.

Finally, What is Grafana explains how Grafana serves as an open-source analytics and monitoring platform that visualizes data from multiple sources, with Azure offering both Azure Managed Grafana as a fully managed service and Azure Monitor dashboards with Grafana in preview for free dashboard creation.