1.3.2. Lineage and Compliance
💡 First Principle: Data lineage answers "where did this number come from?" by tracing transformations backward from report to source. Without lineage, troubleshooting is archaeology—digging through logs to reconstruct what happened.
Fabric provides automatic lineage tracking:
- Source connections
- Transformation steps
- Downstream dependencies
This matters for compliance because auditors can verify: "This report's revenue figure traces back to the ERP system through these documented transformations."
Audit trail: Fabric records user and admin activities (who viewed, created, shared or exported what) in the Microsoft Purview audit log, the Microsoft 365 unified audit log, so an access trail exists without custom logging.
To see these dependencies, open the workspace's Lineage view: it graphs data sources → pipelines, dataflows and notebooks → lakehouses and warehouses → semantic models → reports, and impact analysis lists everything downstream of an item. The Monitor hub shows runs (status, duration), not item-to-item dependencies.
