How Montego Went From Governance Chaos to Clarity in Under 60 Minutes
A global pet nutrition leader needed a single, unified view of their entire Microsoft Fabric estate. FabOps delivered it in under an hour — with no setup fees and no implementation programme.
A global pet nutrition leader needed a single, unified view of their entire Microsoft Fabric estate. FabOps delivered it in under an hour — with no setup fees and no implementation programme.
The Challenge
The client. Montego is a global leader in pet health and wellness, offering premium products made with A-grade ingredients and sustainable practices. As a data-intensive organisation managing complex supply chain and operational analytics, Montego’s data team needed a single, unified tool that could provide comprehensive visibility into governance, cost management, and performance monitoring within Microsoft Fabric.
Montego’s data team was small and centralised — exactly the type of lean, high-performing team that gets most exposed when governance is fragmented across multiple tools and manual processes. Capacity planning was critical. The team needed to know, at any moment, what was consuming their Fabric capacity, which models were underperforming, and where governance gaps existed before they became operational problems.
The challenge wasn’t a lack of capability. It was a lack of a single operational picture. Governance, cost management, and performance monitoring existed across separate views, separate processes, and separate cadences. There was no control tower.
As Nico Botes, Data Team Manager at Montego, described it: “We were looking for a single, unified tool to manage governance, cost, and performance in Microsoft Fabric. FabOps stood out as a one-stop-shop solution.”
- Governance, cost and performance monitoring fragmented across separate tools
- No unified control tower for the Microsoft Fabric estate
- Capacity planning reliant on manual reconciliation
- No visibility into underperforming semantic models before they impacted reporting
The Solution
FabOps was deployed as Montego’s unified governance and monitoring platform — connecting to their Microsoft Fabric tenant via secure Azure APIs with no setup fees, no implementation programme, and no agents to deploy.
Within 60 minutes of activation, Montego’s data team had their first Governance Score, their first cost attribution breakdown, and their first set of AI-powered recommendations — all from a single dashboard.
Why Montego chose FabOps over building internally.
For a lean, centralised data team, the build-vs-buy question was clear. An internal governance build would have taken 12–18 months of engineering time, lacked benchmarking against industry peers, required ongoing maintenance as the Fabric API evolved, and produced no AI-powered recommendations. Montego would have been perpetually behind the platform they were trying to govern.
FabOps provided what no internal build could: Fabric-native governance that was already aligned with Microsoft’s platform roadmap, peer benchmarking that contextualised Montego’s governance score against industry averages, and AI recommendations that identified the highest-impact fixes first.
The decision wasn’t close.
Governance Scoring
AI-powered maturity assessment across 8 dimensions — Collaboration, Cost Efficiency, Data Quality, Governance, Modernisation, Optimisation, Performance, and Security. Each dimension scored, flagged, and linked to actionable recommendations.
Copilot for Fabric
Natural language queries giving the team instant answers on governance status, cost breakdown, and performance metrics — without needing to build custom reports.
Model Optimisation
Automated identification of underperforming semantic models and stale datasets, with prioritised recommendations for Direct Lake migration and refresh pattern improvements.
Refresh Analysis
Deep visibility into data refresh success rates, failure patterns, and bottlenecks — with automated alerting on outages before they affected downstream reporting.
User Access Governance
Permission monitoring across the entire Fabric estate, flagging over-provisioned access, shadow workspaces, and compliance gaps.
Cost Optimisation
Real-time analysis of capacity consumption with savings identification and spend attribution by workspace and workload.
The Results
Actionable insights in under 60 minutes. Governance improvement measured in weeks. Production-grade data estate reliability without manual oversight. Continuous monitoring and score tracking replacing manual audit cycles.
Plus: faster decision-making through automated Fabric outage alerts via email notifications, and effective KPI management for the data team through scoring functionality.
“The UI is intuitive, performance is snappy, and admin controls are well thought-out.”
— Nico Botes, Data Team Manager, Montego
“Alerts on outages and scoring functionality helped us make faster decisions and hit our KPIs. I'd recommend FabOps to any Fabric user — it's lightweight, centralised, and packed with tools that simplify oversight.”
Nico Botes, Data Team Manager, Montego
How We Deliver Results Like These
Every Onyx engagement follows the same proven methodology — from strategy through to continuous governance.
Strategy & Enablement
Align stakeholders, identify use cases, and scope the delivery plan.
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