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What is Real-Time Intelligence?

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Real-Time Intelligence is a powerful service that empowers everyone in your organization to extract insights and visualize their data in motion. It offers an end-to-end solution for event-driven scenarios, streaming data, and data logs. Whether dealing with gigabytes or petabytes, all organizational data in motion converges in the Real-Time Hub. It seamlessly connects time-based data from various sources using no-code connectors, enabling immediate visual insights, geospatial analysis, and trigger-based reactions that are all part of an organization-wide data catalog.

Once you seamlessly connect any stream of data, the entire SaaS solution becomes accessible. Real-Time Intelligence handles data ingestion, transformation, storage, analytics, visualization, tracking, AI, and real-time actions. Your data remains protected, governed, and integrated across your organization, seamlessly aligning with all Fabric offerings. Real-Time Intelligence transforms your data into a dynamic, actionable resource that drives value across the entire organization.

Can Real-Time Intelligence help me?

Real-Time Intelligence can be used for data analysis, immediate visual insights, centralization of data in motion for an organization, actions on data, efficient querying, transformation, and storage of large volumes of structured or unstructured data. Whether you need to evaluate data from IoT systems, system logs, free text, semi structured data, or contribute data for consumption by others in your organization, Real-Time Intelligence provides a versatile solution.

Even though it's called "real-time," your data doesn't have to be flowing at high rates and volumes. Real-Time Intelligence gives you event-driven, rather than schedule-driven solutions. The Real-Time Intelligence components are built on trusted, core Microsoft services, and together they extend the overall Fabric capabilities to provide event-driven solutions.

Real-Time Intelligence applications span a wide variety of business scenarios, such as automotive, manufacturing, IoT, fraud detection, business operations management, and anomaly detection.

How do I use Real-Time Intelligence?

Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric offers capabilities that, in combination, enable the creation of Real-Time Intelligence solutions in support of business and engineering processes.

Diagram of the architecture of Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric.

  • The Real-Time hub serves as a centralized catalog within your organization. It facilitates easy access, addition, exploration, and data sharing. By expanding the range of data sources, it enables broader insights and visual clarity across various domains. Importantly, this hub ensures that data is not only available but also accessible to all, promoting quick decision-making and informed action. The sharing of streaming data from diverse sources unlocks the potential to build comprehensive business intelligence across your organization.

  • Once you select a stream from your organization or connected to outside or internal sources, you can use the data consumption tools in Real-Time Intelligence to explore your data. The data consumption tools use visual data exploration process and drill down on data insights. You can access data that's new to you and easily understand the data structure, patterns, anomalies, forecasting quantities, and data rates. Accordingly, you can act or make smart decision based on the data. Real-Time dashboards come equipped with out-of-the-box interactions that simplify the process of understanding data, making it accessible to anyone who wants to make decision based on data in motion using visual tools, Natural Language and Copilot.

  • These insights can be turned into actions with Data Activator, as you set up Reflex alerts from various parts of Fabric to react to data patterns or conditions in real-time.

How do you interact with the components of Real-Time Intelligence?

Discover streaming data

The Real-Time hub is used to discover and manage your streaming data. Real-Time hub events is a catalog of data in motion, and contains:

  • Data streams: All data streams that are actively running in Fabric, which you have access to.

  • Microsoft sources: Easily discover streaming sources that you have and quickly configure ingestion of those sources into Fabric, for example: Azure Event Hubs, Azure IoT Hub, Azure SQL DB Change Data Capture (CDC), Azure Cosmos DB CDC, PostgreSQL DB CDC.

  • Fabric events: Event-driven capabilities support real-time notifications and data processing. You can monitor and react to events including Fabric Workspace Item events and Azure Blob Storage events. These events can be used to trigger other actions or workflows, such as invoking a data pipeline or sending a notification via email. You can also send these events to other destinations via Event streams.

This data is all presented in a readily consumable format and is available to all Fabric workloads.

Connect to streaming data

Event streams are the Fabric platform way to capture, transform, and route high volumes of real-time events to various destinations with a no-code experience. Event streams support multiple data sources and data destinations, including a wide range of connectors to external sources, for example: Apache Kafka clusters, database change data capture feeds, AWS streaming sources (Kinesis), and Google (GCP Pub/Sub).

Process data streams

By using the event processing capabilities in Event streams, you can do filtering, data cleansing, transformation, windowed aggregations, and dupe detection, to land the data in the shape you want. You can also use the content-based routing capabilities to send data to different destinations based on filters. Another feature, derived event streams, lets you construct new streams as a result of transformations and/or aggregations that can be shared to consumers in Real-Time hub.

Store and analyze data

Event houses are the ideal analytics engine to process data in motion. They're tailored to time-based, streaming events with structured, semi structured, and unstructured data. This data is automatically indexed and partitioned based on ingestion time, giving you incredibly fast and complex analytic querying capabilities on high-granularity data. Data stored in event houses can be made available in OneLake for consumption by other Fabric experiences.

The indexed, partitioned data stored in event houses is ready for lightning-fast query using various code, low-code, or no-code options in Fabric. Data can be queried in native KQL (Kusto Query Language) or using T-SQL in the KQL queryset. The Kusto copilot, along with the no-code query exploration experience, streamlines the process of analyzing data for both experienced KQL users and citizen data scientists. KQL is a simple, yet powerful language to query structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. The language is expressive, easy to read and understand the query intent, and optimized for authoring experiences.

Visualize data insights

These data insights can be visualized in KQL querysets, Real-Time dashboards and Power BI reports, with seconds from data ingestion to insights. Visualization options range from no-code to fully specialized experiences, giving value to both the novice and expert insights explorer to visualize their data as charts and tables. You can use visual cues to perform filtering and aggregation operations on query results and using a rich list of built-in visualizations. These insights can be viewed in Power BI Reports and Real-Time Dashboards, both of which can have alerts built upon the data insights.

Trigger actions

Alerts monitor changing data and automatically take actions when patterns or conditions are detected. The data can be flowing in Real-Time hub, or observed from a Kusto query or Power BI report. When certain conditions or logic is met, an action is then taken, such as alerting users, executing Fabric job items like a pipeline, or kicking off Power Automate workflows. The logic can be either a simply defined threshold, a pattern such as events happening repeatedly over a time period, or the results of complex logic defined by a KQL query. Data Activator turns your event-driven insights into actionable business advantages.

Integrate with other Fabric experiences

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