Get relevant information in real time with Microsoft Fabric

Companies are faced with managing an ever-increasing and unmanageable volume of data. This volume continues to grow, adding to it the different sources or forms of structuring, which makes it more and more difficult to manage.

According to a Gartner study, 74% of organizations are actively seeking new information automation tools for their business. This is why the data fabric market has become one of the most important technological trends of the moment. Below, we explain how Microsoft Fabric can become your best ally when it comes to obtaining relevant information from your data in real-time.

Getting the most out of your data

With the fast-paced, ever-changing landscape of data and analytics, as well as the momentum they are gaining with the advent of generative AI, have made real-time autonomous actions more important than ever.

Each new trend that emerges requires new services that companies must manually integrate into their data estate, increasing both costs and complexity.

With the arrival of Microsoft Fabric in the market, data estates are simplified and prepared thanks to a unified platform powered by AI that is constantly evolving. One of its strengths is its ability to keep up with trends and integrate each new capability, allowing less time to be spent on integrating and managing data assets and more time to be spent on extracting value from data.

Fabric is a SaaS analytics solution that spans from data movement to data science to real-time analytics to business intelligence. It combines the best of Power BI, Synapse, and Data Factory into a unified software platform with seven core workloads, each designed specifically for specific people and tasks.

With this type of unified architecture, you can reduce costs and efforts typical of integrating analytics services and help simplify each company’s data estate. It also helps manage and protect data more effectively with end-to-end security and governance capabilities.

The best of real-time data

Fabric gives teams the ability to unify, transform, analyze, and extract value from data, all from a single platform.

With its latest additions in workloads, Fabric’s capabilities have become more robust and customizable:

• The workload has been redesigned thanks to Real-Time Intelligence, which brings together and enhances Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator to help analyze and act on high-volume, high-granularity event streaming data. Most importantly, explore each organization’s data in real-time from this new data center.
• New tools such as the Fabric Workload Development Kit, the Application Programming Interface (API) for GraphQL™, and user data functions have been added, which can help developers create more powerful solutions.
• A new feature has also been included in the Microsoft Azure Data Factory experience called “Data Workflow,” powered by the Apache Airflow runtime environment, which helps create, schedule, and monitor workflows or data pipelines using Python.

Real-Time Intelligence to get the data when it is needed most

Thanks to this enhanced workload, new additional functionality is offered to aid in decision-making with up-to-the-minute information. From ingest to transformation, query, and immediate action, it is an end-to-end experience that enables seamless handling of real-time data without the need to download it first.

With Real-Time Intelligence, you can ingest streaming data at high granularity, dynamically transform streaming data, query real-time data for instant feedback, and trigger actions such as upsetting a production manager when equipment is overheating or rerunning jobs when data pipelines fail.

Behind this workload is the real-time hub, which enables the discovery, management, and use of streaming data from Fabric events and other Microsoft sources, third-party cloud providers, and other external sources.

All events flowing through the real-time hub can be easily transformed and routed to any Fabric data warehouse, as well as create new flows that can be discovered and consumed.

From this real-time hub, you can pull information through the data profile, set the right level of approval, set alerts on changing conditions, and so on. All without leaving the center.

Real-time intelligence can be used for data analysis, immediate visual reporting, 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 to data for consumption by other users in your organization, real-time intelligence provides a versatile solution.

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

How to interact with intelligence components in real time?

The real-time center acts as a centralized catalog within the organization and the various components are as follows:

• Streaming data detection: real-time center events are a catalog of data in motion and contain:
  • Data streams where you see all the data streams that are actively running in Fabric.
  • Microsoft Sources, which easily detects the streaming sources you have and quickly configures their ingest.
  • Fabric Events, where event-driven functionality supports real-time notifications and data processing.
• Connecting to streaming data: Event streams are Fabric’s way of capturing, transforming, and routing large volumes of real-time events to target watts with a codeless experience. Event streams support a variety of data sources and destinations, including a wide range of connectors to external sources.
• Process data streams: filtering, data cleansing, transformation, window aggregations, and replica detection can be performed to put the data in the way you want. You can also use content-based routing functionalities to send data to different destinations based on filters
• Store and analyze data: Eventhouses are the ideal analysis engine for processing data in motion. They accommodate time-based streaming events with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Data is automatically indexed and partitioned based on ingest time, providing incredibly fast and complex analytical query capabilities on high-granularity data.
• Data Information Visualization: Data findings can be visualized in KQL query sets, real-time dashboards and PowerBI reports, with seconds of data ingestion to information. Visualization options range from no-code to fully specialized experiences, giving value to the novice and expert findings explorer to visualize their data as graphs and charts.
• Trigger actions: Alerts monitor data change and automatically take action when patterns or conditions are detected. Data can flow into the center in real-time or be observed from a Kusto query or Power BI report. When certain conditions or logic are met, an action is taken, such as alerting users, executing Fabric work items such as a pipeline, or initiating Power Automate workflows.

Why is real-time Analysis so important?

Users have become accustomed to interactive, on-demand, and virtually unlimited data. This has led to demands for a better user experience, and real-time data analytics is a key business branch, revolutionizing decision-making processes and dynamically shaping an organization’s strategies.

In the face of a rapidly changing business environment, the ability to analyze data instantly has become a necessity, and thanks to it, companies gain the ability to monitor events in real-time.

This allows you to react quickly to changes and solve potential problems. And at Plain Concepts we help you to make the most of it.

We offer you a Microsoft Fabric Adoption Framework with which we will evaluate the technological and business solutions, we will make a clear roadmap for the data strategy, we visualize the use cases that make the difference in your company, we take into account the sizing of equipment, times and costs, we study the compatibility with existing data platforms and we migrate Power BI, Synapse and Data warehouse solutions to Fabric. Don’t wait any longer!