Microsoft Fabric's workload for data in motion. Using eventstreams, eventhouses with KQL databases, the Real-Time hub, Real-Time Dashboards and Activator, it takes in events, processes, stores and analyses them, and acts on them.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Real-Time Intelligence in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Microsoft Fabric
Analytics platform from Microsoft delivered as SaaS on top of OneLake, offering capabilities including Direct Lake and shortcuts.
- Workload
Also called an experience: a Fabric toolset aimed at one job role, e.g. Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Intelligence or Power BI. Each keeps its data in OneLake.
- KQL
Kusto Query Language, used read-only to query Azure Data Explorer, Log Analytics and Microsoft Sentinel; log alert rules are written in it too.
- Real-Time hub
Microsoft Fabric's automatically provisioned, tenant-wide hub for finding, bringing in and managing streaming data, listing data streams, KQL tables, Microsoft sources and Fabric events in one place.
- Activator
Rather than just displaying data as a dashboard does, this Real-Time Intelligence tool in Microsoft Fabric reacts to it. You define rules without writing code, and once a pattern or condition is spotted it can send an email or Teams message, or start a Power Automate flow or Fabric pipeline.
Related terms
- Amazon MSK
Amazon's managed Apache Kafka offering on AWS. In Fabric Real-Time Intelligence it can be added as an eventstream source to pull in its topics.
- Eventhouse
Holds one or more KQL databases and is where Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric keeps time-stamped streaming events for analysis, indexed by the moment they arrive.
- Eventstream
Lets you pull live events into Microsoft Fabric from Apache Kafka, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Event Hubs and similar sources, reshape them and pass them on elsewhere, all with no coding; it belongs to Real-Time Intelligence.
- Fabric Eventstream
A Real-Time Intelligence item in Fabric that takes in events as they happen, can reshape them with no code, and sends them on to destinations. SQL change event streaming is one way to feed it row changes.
- Fabric workload
Microsoft Fabric groups its features into workloads, each serving a role or job, for instance Power BI, Real-Time Intelligence, Data Warehouse, Data Factory or Data Engineering; they all read and write the same OneLake data.
- Operations agent
A preview item in Real-Time Intelligence that keeps watch over eventhouse or ontology data, compares it with business rules and either proposes or performs actions. Failed pipeline runs can also be handed to it from the Monitor hub for a read-only investigation.
- Real-Time Dashboard
An item in Fabric Real-Time Intelligence that displays streaming data as live visuals with low latency. Each tile combines a KQL query and a visual, and Copilot can help create tiles from natural-language requests.
- Real-time streaming semantic model
Covers live-fed push, streaming and PubNub models, plus streaming dashboard tiles. Microsoft now steers people towards Real-Time Intelligence in Fabric, as these are being retired and new ones can only be made until 31 October 2027.