What Is Microsoft Purview, and Where Does Power BI Sentinel Fit Alongside It?
What is Microsoft Purview?
Microsoft Purview is Microsoft’s suite of data governance, risk and compliance tools. It catalogues the data across your entire estate, classifies sensitive information, maps lineage between systems and enforces compliance policies, spanning Azure, Microsoft 365, on-premises sources and even other clouds such as AWS. It replaced and expanded what was previously called Azure Purview.
Purview is how a large organisation answers “what data do we have, where is it, and how sensitive is it?” across everything it owns.
What Purview is designed to do brilliantly, and what it deliberately leaves to specialised tooling, are two different things. Understanding that boundary is the difference between a governance stack that works and a licensing bill that disappoints. This guide covers both.
What does Microsoft Purview do?
Purview brings together capabilities that used to live in separate Microsoft products. The core capabilities:
- Data Map and Catalog. Automated scanning and cataloguing of data sources across your estate, building a searchable inventory of databases, lakes, warehouses and files.
- Data classification. Scanning actual content to find and label sensitive information, such as personal information, financial data and credentials, which is the foundation for risk management and privacy compliance.
- Estate-wide lineage. A visual map of how data flows between systems, from operational sources through ETL pipelines into storage and analytics platforms.
- Sensitivity labels. Consistent labelling that follows data across the Microsoft ecosystem, from a database column to a Power BI report to an exported Excel file.
- Data Loss Prevention and compliance. Policy enforcement, records management, audit and insider risk capabilities inherited from the Microsoft 365 compliance portal.
If your organisation runs on Microsoft, some of this is already available to you through existing licensing, which is one of the reasons Purview adoption is accelerating. The AI wave is the other reason. Copilots and AI agents consume whatever data they can reach, so knowing what you have and how sensitive it is has moved from a compliance nicety to a prerequisite.
How does Microsoft Purview work?
Purview works by scanning. You register your data sources, and Purview’s scanners connect to them on a schedule, reading metadata and sampling content. The results feed the Data Map, which becomes the single inventory of your estate, and the classification engine, which tags sensitive content as it is discovered.
Governance teams then work from that inventory: assigning data owners, applying policies, tracing lineage when something looks wrong and evidencing compliance when someone asks.
Two practical realities are worth knowing before you begin. First, Purview rewards investment. It takes real time and skilled resources to set up, tune and maintain, and an unmaintained catalogue quietly becomes fiction. Second, costs scale with usage. The more sources you scan and the more data you process, the more you pay, so scoping the rollout matters as much as the technology.
Where does Purview’s Power BI coverage stop?
By design, Purview goes broad rather than deep. It covers your entire data estate at a consistent level of detail, which is exactly what an estate-wide tool should do. For Power BI specifically, that means Purview sees your workspaces and datasets, captures basic lineage and carries sensitivity labels through to reports.
Think of data governance as a ten-step journey. Purview does steps one to three across everything you own: catalogue it, classify it, map it. Steps four to ten are the Power BI-specific operational depth that a broad tool was never intended to provide:
- Report-level usage auditing with durable retention: who viewed, exported or shared what, and when
- Change tracking on reports and measures, so you can prove what a calculation was on a given date
- Granular lineage inside Power BI, down to table, view and measure level
- Permissions monitoring across workspaces, with alerts when access drifts
- Refresh monitoring, so you know a report’s data was current when it was read
- Backups and point-in-time recovery for reports and datasets
- Automated documentation of the estate as it actually is today
None of this is a criticism of Purview. A tool that scanned your entire estate at that depth would be unusable and unaffordable. It is a boundary, and boundaries are where complementary tools earn their place.
What is Power BI Sentinel?
Power BI Sentinel is a purpose-built governance and monitoring tool for Power BI, developed by Purple Frog Systems in the UK and implemented in Australia by partners including MIP. It picks up where estate-wide tooling stops, providing the auditing, change tracking, granular lineage, permissions monitoring, backups and automated documentation described above, specifically for your Power BI and Fabric environment.
Sentinel’s own developers describe the relationship with Purview the same way we do: the two are complementary rather than competing. Purview provides breadth of coverage over your entire data estate. Sentinel provides depth of information for Power BI. That is the vendor’s official position, it matches Microsoft’s partner ecosystem model, and it matches what we see in deployments.
Purview or Power BI Sentinel: which one do you need?
For most enterprise Power BI estates, the honest answer is both, because they answer different questions.
| Question you need answered | Tool |
| What data exists across our whole estate? | Purview |
| Where is our sensitive data, in any system? | Purview |
| How does data flow between our platforms? | Purview |
| Who viewed or exported this specific report, and when? | Sentinel |
| What did this measure calculate three months ago? | Sentinel |
| Which reports does this database column feed? | Sentinel |
| Whose Power BI access should have been removed? | Sentinel |
| Can we restore this dataset as it was in March? | Sentinel |
A useful test: if the question starts with “across everything we own,” it is a Purview question. If it starts with “in this specific report” or “prove it to an auditor,” it is a Sentinel question.
If you run a small Power BI estate with no broader governance mandate, Sentinel alone may be enough to make the estate defensible. If you have an estate-wide governance program but only light Power BI usage, Purview alone may carry you for a while. At enterprise scale, with a board asking AI questions and an auditor asking evidence questions, the two-layer model is what actually holds up. We covered what that evidence layer needs to include in our guide to compliance monitoring for Power BI.
How do Purview and Sentinel work together in practice?
A typical enterprise deployment layers them like this:
- Purview owns the estate map. Every source registered, scanned and classified. Sensitivity labels defined once and applied consistently, flowing through to Power BI content.
- Sentinel owns the Power BI evidence layer. Durable audit logs, change history, granular lineage, permissions monitoring and backups running continuously against the tenant.
- Governance teams work top-down. Estate-level risk questions go to Purview. Anything requiring report-level proof, history or recovery goes to Sentinel.
- AI readiness falls out as a by-product. Purview tells your AI program what data exists and what is sensitive. Sentinel ensures the reports your copilots draw from are governed, current and traceable. AI-first strategies depend on data-first foundations, and this stack is what data-first looks like in a Microsoft shop.
The pattern to avoid is buying either tool as a strategy substitute. Software makes governance sustainable. It does not make governance happen. That still takes sequencing, ownership and execution, which is the part most organisations underestimate and the part where the expensive strategy documents tend to stall.
Frequently asked questions
What is Microsoft Purview in simple terms?
Microsoft Purview is Microsoft’s toolset for finding, classifying and governing data across an organisation’s entire estate. It builds a catalogue of what data you have, flags what is sensitive and maps how data moves between systems.
Is Microsoft Purview free?
Some Purview capabilities are included with Microsoft 365 enterprise licensing, while others, including estate scanning and cataloguing, are billed on consumption through Azure. In practice, most organisations pay based on how much they scan and process, so Purview should be scoped and budgeted rather than assumed free.
Is Purview included in Microsoft 365 E3?
E3 includes a baseline set of Purview compliance capabilities, with the more advanced features reserved for E5 or add-on licensing, and the data governance side billed separately through Azure consumption. Licensing here changes frequently, so verify current inclusions before committing. We cover the full cost picture, including what is not included, in our Purview pricing guide.
Is Purview part of Microsoft 365?
Purview spans both Microsoft 365 and Azure. Its compliance capabilities are managed alongside Microsoft 365, while its data governance capabilities operate as an Azure service that can scan sources well beyond the Microsoft ecosystem.
What is data lineage?
Data lineage is the documented path data takes from its source to where it is consumed, showing every system and transformation along the way. It is how you prove where a number came from. Purview maps lineage across your estate at a system level, while tools like Power BI Sentinel provide detailed lineage inside Power BI down to table, view and measure level.
Does Microsoft Purview replace Power BI Sentinel?
No. The two are complementary, a position Sentinel’s own developers share. Purview provides broad governance across your whole data estate, while Sentinel provides deep monitoring, auditing and recovery specifically for Power BI. Enterprise estates typically run both.
MIP implements Purview and Power BI Sentinel for Australian organisations, and has spent 30 years making governance stick after the strategy document is written. If you are weighing up either tool, talk to us before you scope the rollout.