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What is Real-Time Dashboard?

Real-Time Dashboard is Microsoft Fabric’s solution for live monitoring and visualization. It empowers users to act on streaming data instantly, transforming information in motion into actionable insights. Designed for operations analysts, data engineers, and business users alike, Real-Time Dashboard provides integrated tools to ingest, query, and visualize granular data in seconds. Unlike traditional BI tools, Real-Time Dashboard is purpose-built for real-time operational scenarios, making it essential for industries where speed and accuracy drive outcomes.

This overview explains how Real-Time Dashboard works, highlights its key features, and provides guides and helpful references to help you get started and gain timely insights from your data.

Screenshot of a real-time dashboard in Fabric displaying sample bike data.

Key features

  • Live data monitoring: Dashboards update continuously or at refresh intervals as low as 10 seconds, ensuring continuous access to the most current data.
  • Interactive exploration: Engage with real-time data through interactive dashboards that allow you to:
    • Slice and dice by time other custom dimensions to focus on key metrics.
    • Apply filters or drill down on chart elements to refine other visuals or dive deeper into the data.
  • No-code experience: Empower users to create dashboards and explore their underlying data through an intuitive, no-code interface. This includes:
    • Quickly build dashboards with Copilot assistance.
    • Create KQL queries using Copilot to retrieve and visualize data without needing deep technical expertise. Copilot is available in the Real-Time Dashboard tile editing pane, where you can use natural language prompts to generate, replace, and refine tile queries.
    • Use the Explorer Data feature to analyze underlying data without writing queries.
  • Proactive monitoring with alerts: Integrated with Data Activator to enable real-time monitoring and alerting based on data changes. It allows you to:
    • Define thresholds for key metrics displayed on your Real-Time dashboard.
    • Trigger alerts when metrics exceed defined limits, ensuring timely responses to critical events.
    • Automate actions such as sending notifications via email or Microsoft Teams, or initiating Power Automate flows.
  • Git integration: Sync dashboards with GitHub or Azure DevOps for version control and collaborative development.
  • Permission separation: Share dashboards securely without exposing the underlying data, enabling safe collaboration.

Getting started

Supported data sources

Real-Time Dashboard seamlessly integrates with a variety of data sources, enabling you to monitor and visualize real-time data from multiple platforms. Supported data sources include:

  • Eventhouse: A high-performance event streaming platform designed for ingesting and processing real-time data streams efficiently.
  • Azure Data Explorer: A powerful analytics service optimized for querying and analyzing large volumes of log and telemetry data in real time.
  • Azure Monitor - Application Insights: A comprehensive tool for monitoring live application performance, identifying bottlenecks, and diagnosing issues.
  • Azure Monitor - Log Analytics: A scalable service for querying and analyzing log data from diverse Azure resources, providing actionable insights.

By connecting to these data sources, Real-Time Dashboard ensures you can harness the full potential of your streaming data to drive timely and informed decisions.

How do I create a Real-Time Dashboard?

Create a Real-Time Dashboard to visualize and explore insights quickly with real-time changing data, in two ways:

  1. Manually create a dashboard:

    • Set up the Real-Time Dashboard step by step.
    • Manually select and configure data sources.
    • Write Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries to retrieve and visualize data in dashboard tiles, or use Copilot directly in the tile editor to author or modify queries with natural language.
    • Design and organize the layout of your dashboard.

  2. Use Copilot to automate dashboard creation:

    • Select a data source, use natural language prompts, and Copilot automatically generates a Real-Time Dashboard as a starting point.
    • Customize the generated dashboard by modifying queries, adding or removing tiles, and adjusting the layout to fit your needs.

Next steps

After understanding the basics of Real-Time Dashboard and setting up your first dashboard, explore these resources to enhance your skills and make the most of Real-Time Dashboard:

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