Alerting and acting on data from the Real-Time hub
Microsoft Fabric’s new Real-Time hub makes it easier than ever to discover, preview, and use streaming data from around your organization. But the data in these streams is only as useful as the actions and changes it can drive in your business. Data Activator provides a no-code experience for automatically taking actions when patterns or conditions are detected in changing data and is embedded around the Real-Time hub to make creating alerts accessible at all times.
This can enable a host of scenarios such as:
- Monitor store sales and when they decline, alert the store managers.
- Alert retail managers to move food from failing grocery store freezers before it spoils.
- Retain customers who had a bad experience by tracking their journey through apps, websites etc.
- Help logistics operations find lost shipments proactively by starting an investigation workflow when package status isn’t updated for a certain length of time.
- Track data pipeline quality, either rerunning jobs or alerting when pipelines fail or anomalies are detected.
You can find out more about the Real-Time hub in our blog post from earlier this week.
Alerting from the Real-Time hub
When you’re looking at the details page for streams or system events in the Real-Time hub, you will see an option to ‘Set alert’
This will open a side panel where you can create a Data Activator reflex that will monitor your events. You configure the events you want to monitor, the conditions you want to look for, and the action you want Data Activator to take.
The Monitor section will be pre-filled with the stream you started from.
The Condition area lets you choose what you want to look for in the data. You can choose to act on every event, compare values in the event to thresholds, or group the events for each business object they represent and track changes over time. Check out the Data Activator documentation for more details.
Under Action you can choose how you want Data Activator to react once the conditions are met. Sending an email or Teams message will alert just you when those conditions are met. You can customize this later in the reflex item that is created. ‘Run a Fabric item’ allows you to run pipelines, notebooks and Spark Jobs. If there are other Fabric activities that you’d like to be able to start in response to events, please give us feedback at http://aka.ms/dataActivatorIdeas!
Finally, you need to specify a Data Activator reflex item to save the alert in. Choose the workspace and item – this can be in the same workspace as the item hosting the stream or a different one.
Alerting from Real-Time Dashboards
Data Activator has supported alerting on Power BI reports for some time; you can now set up alerts from Real-Time Dashboards as well. From the … menu on Real-Time Dashboard tiles you can choose ‘Set alert’:
This will open the same pane as before, connected to monitor the data in the dashboard tile. The data will be polled on a regular basis, pulling in the data visible in the tile and comparing to the condition you set.
Anomaly detection triggers in Private Preview
In the announcement of Real-Time Intelligence at Build, we also announced that we are bringing automated anomaly detection to Data Activator triggers. These will help find ‘unknown unknowns’ in your streaming and real-time data, going beyond basic rules to look for individual data points that lie outside the normal ranges.
If you’re interested in learning more, you can fill out https://aka.ms/anomalyDetectionPreview. We’ll be accepting a small number of customers in the Private Preview phase based on region, use case etc. We’ll reach out via email if we are able to enroll you in the preview and will let you know when it is more broadly available.
Learn more, and help us with your feedback
To find out more about Real-Time Intelligence, read Yitzhak Kesselman’s announcement. As we launch our preview, we’d love to hear what you think and how you’re using the product. The best way to get in touch with us is through our community forum or submit an idea. For detailed how-tos, tutorials and other resources, check out the documentation.
This is part of a series of blog posts that dive into all the capabilities of Real-Time Intelligence. Stay tuned for more!
