Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog

Driving actions from your data with Data Activator

A new way to drive actions from your data

See Arun Ulagaratchagan’s blog post to read the full Microsoft Fabric preview announcement.

Your data is only valuable if you can act on it. This means you need to generate insights from your data, then convert those insights into jobs to be done. If you are like many organizations, you meet this need today by manually monitoring a set of reports and dashboards. This can be time-consuming, and that time is multiplied across each department, region, and business unit in your organization.

You can reduce the time involved through automated monitoring but, to date, automation has typically required writing code. Coding can be expensive and brittle, and the costs involved mean that few organizations have found it worthwhile to invest in automation.

That is why we have envisioned a brand-new way to act on your data. We call it Data Activator. Data Activator is a no-code Microsoft Fabric experience that empowers the business analyst to drive actions automatically from your data.

Putting Data Activator to use

Data Activator can act on any type of data in Microsoft Fabric, from relatively slow-moving data in warehouses, to real-time streaming data in Azure Event Hubs. Here are a few examples of how you might put Data Activator to use in your organization:

- Sales: alert a sales manager if a particular customer is in arrears with their payments
- Inventory: check whether inventory levels for a particular product are sufficient, and notify an operations manager if not.
- IT Operations: automatically monitor data quality metrics and kick off remedial processes if those metrics are below target.
- IoT: automatically create an engineering support ticket if a refrigerator temperature is too high.

How Data Activator works

Data Activator drives actions through a 3-step process:

Connect to your data: Data Activator can connect to a wide range of data sources in Microsoft Fabric, from Power BI datasets, Eventstreams, and more. Once Data Activator is connected to your data, it continually monitors it for actionable patterns.

Detect actionable conditions: Data Activator gives you a single place to define actionable patterns in your data. These can range from simple thresholds (such as a value being exceeded) to more complex patterns over time (such a value trending down).

Trigger actions: When Data Activator detects an actionable pattern, it triggers an action. That action can be an email or a Teams alert to the relevant person in your organization. It can also be triggering an automatic process, via a Power Automate flow or an action in one of your organization’s line-of-business apps.

Get started with Data Activator

You can create a Data Activator trigger directly from within Power BI. Just click a visual, then choose “trigger action” to create an alert on that visual’s data. For real-time streaming data, just point Data Activator at your Event Hub.

Figure 2: Data Activator within Power BI (left). Connecting to Event Hubs (right)

Designing Triggers

Data Activator’s trigger designer lets you define trigger conditions with a visual, no-code tool. Here, a trigger sends a Teams notification if a machine on the factory floor is vibrating too much:

Figure 3: Data Activator’s no-code trigger designer

Sign up for the Data Activator preview!

Data Activator is currently in preview. To get the preview, first get Microsoft Fabric (see below for details). Then, sign up for the Data Activator preview at aka.ms/dataActivatorPreview. We would love to hear from you!

How to get Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is currently in preview. Try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for the free trial—no credit card information required. Everyone who signs up gets a fixed Fabric trial capacity, which may be used for any feature or capability from integrating data to creating machine learning models. Existing Power BI Premium customers can simply turn on Fabric through the Power BI admin portal. After July 1, 2023, Fabric will be enabled for all Power BI tenants.

Sign up for the free trial. For more information read the Fabric trial docs.