Troubleshooting a slow Fabric warehouse has typically meant moving between several places: one view for active sessions, another for historical query data, and often a custom dashboard or two for spotting regressions. It works, but it's slower than it needs to be.
Microsoft has just rolled out a preview that aims to cut through that. Data Warehouse Monitor — formerly known as Query Activity — is a redesigned monitoring experience inside Fabric Data Warehouse that pulls live queries, completed runs, and direct query control into a single view.
What it actually does
The headline change is consolidation. According to the announcement from Microsoft's Mariya Ali and Twinkle Cyril, DW Monitor shows running queries and completed query runs side by side in the same UI. That sounds modest. In practice, it changes the diagnostic workflow.
Instead of jumping between tools to answer "is this query still running or did it finish?" and "how does this run compare to previous ones?", you stay in one screen. The team frames it around three goals: unified visibility across live and completed queries, fast pattern recognition across executions, and immediate action when something is causing impact.
That third point matters. When a query is clearly stuck, you can cancel it with a single click directly from the monitoring view. No tool-switching, no hunting down the right T-SQL. Diagnostic insight and operational control in the same place.
It's worth noting that, per the existing Microsoft Learn documentation for Query Activity, access is restricted to workspace admins — members, contributors, and viewers don't get in. Worth checking against your team's role model before rolling it out as the standard troubleshooting flow.
Pattern recognition, not just snapshots
The historical angle is where this gets more interesting than a typical "live sessions" dashboard. DW Monitor is designed to let you analyse query performance across multiple executions — so you can spot regressions against prior runs, identify queries that are habitually slow or resource-hungry, and work out whether a performance issue is new, intermittent, or systemic.
For anyone who's had to explain a slowdown to a stakeholder using only anecdotal evidence, this is the more useful capability. It's the difference between reacting to a single bad execution and being able to demonstrate that a particular query has regressed since a recent change.
It's also a better story for validating deployments. Pushed a new view definition or changed how a table is loaded? You can compare how the same query performed before and after, in the same place you'd look anyway during an incident.
Built on Query Insights
Under the hood, DW Monitor sits on top of Query Insights, the execution-level telemetry layer that already exists in Fabric Data Warehouse. That's the engine providing the cross-run comparison data and the historical visibility — and it's the same source feeding views like queryinsights.exec_requests_history that many teams already query directly.
Two caveats worth keeping in mind from the underlying docs: completed queries can take up to 15 minutes to appear in Query Insights depending on concurrent workload, and the UI surfaces a top set of rows for a given filter selection rather than the entire history. For deep forensics, the raw views remain available alongside the new UX.
Why this shift in UX matters
There's a quiet but real argument tucked inside the announcement: monitoring tools should match how people actually troubleshoot. The split between "live" and "historical" views is a database-engine artefact, not a user workflow. When you're investigating a problem, you don't think in those categories — you think about this query, across whatever timeframe is relevant.
DW Monitor leans into that. One unified view, consistent navigation across query states, a shorter path from symptom to action. The Microsoft team also positions it as a foundation that will evolve with "richer insights, deeper analysis, and tighter integration across Fabric" — so today's preview is the floor, not the ceiling.
Getting started
The feature is in preview now. Microsoft has published documentation for monitoring T-SQL queries in Fabric Data Warehouse, alongside the existing Query Activity docs and a broader piece on mastering monitoring across the warehouse — all linked from the original announcement on the Fabric Community blog.
Worth a look if you're already running production workloads on Fabric Data Warehouse, particularly if your team has built its own monitoring layer on top of the raw Query Insights views. And if you're still evaluating Fabric against alternatives, the trajectory of features like this — observability tools catching up with the workloads people are actually running — is part of the picture. It's one of the threads that keeps coming up in the data and AI conversations across the European tech community, and exactly the kind of practical, day-two operational detail the ECS crowd tends to dig into.