Announcing Updates to Data Activator in Public Preview
Share Your Feedback
We are committed to continuously improving Real-Time Intelligence and Data Activator. 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 documentationWhat’s Next?
We’ll continue to make improvements as we approach General Availability of Data Activator. As we continue to make exciting, new updates, we will be making changes to the schema of reflex items to support application lifecycle management to help you manage the process of making your reflexes production ready. We also have some updates on Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment to help with options to programmatically create rules in reflexes. With these upcoming updates, if you have existing reflex artifacts, please note they may require a migration process, and there may be some data loss.What is Data Activator?
Data Activator, part of Real-Time Intelligence, facilitates the generation of automatic alerts and actions from your Fabric data. It is designed with a user-friendly visual interface that requires no technical expertise, making it accessible to anyone within your organization. Data Activator works over your streaming data in Eventstreams and Eventhouses, and Data Activator alerts can be seamlessly created directly from your Power BI reports, allowing business users to engage with it through the reports they are already utilizing. It aims to streamline data workflows, automate processes, and provide actionable insights that drive business growth but at the granular level of individual objects.
How does Data Activator work?
- Monitors your Fabric data, including Power BI report visuals and real-time Eventstreams.
- Detects actionable conditions with a rule creation experience that allows you to set anything from simple thresholds to complex patterns, without coding.
- Acts automatically when conditions are met by sending alerts via email or Microsoft Teams, and activating Power Automate flows for various third-party systems and applications.
What has changed since the Public Preview announcement in October?
In October, we announced the public preview of Data Activator. In May, we announced Real-Time Intelligence bringing together Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator. Thank you all for trying it and giving us feedback. Based on your comments and feedback, we’ve made a number of updates to streamline the user experience.
Simplified Navigation and Explorer Pane
To provide a cleaner, simpler, and more organized interface, we have introduced unified the Data and Design tabs. This allows you to see your data while you build your objects and create rules on top of your data all in one view.
Improved Rule Authoring Experience
We’ve introduced a new definition pane that offers a view of what has been set in your rule, making it easier to fill out and navigate the controls available to fine tune your rules. This enhancement simplifies the process of editing and reviewing rule definitions.
Event-Based Rules
In addition to setting rules on properties, you can now set rules directly on event streams. This allows you to get alerts whenever a new event comes in on a stream.
Actions Preview
The actions preview feature allows you to get a preview of what a message will look like to your alert receivers. This will help you ensure that your actions look exactly as expected and that your alert receivers will receive all the associated information needed.
Sample reflex
We’ve made some updates to the sample reflex, so you can explore and discover the possibilities with Data Activator. In it, you’ll find a new tour that will walk you through the main modeling concepts in Data Activator, see new views that will help you discover more from your data, and show you a variety of rules you can create with added condition expressivity.
Simplified Explorer Pane from Embedded Rule Creation Experiences
Azure Data Lake Storage customers can create business rules when Fabric events occur, and PBI users can create rules on measures they want to monitor. We’ve improved the experience to help provide a seamless transition into Data Activator.
ADLS
When kicking off a data pipeline to set an alert on blob storage events when they occur, Data Activator previously created separate events, created an object, extracted the subject and type and turned them into properties. User feedback indicated it was hard to tell why the object was created, what event each subject and type property belonged to, and a rule had been created for each event.
In the improved version, you see a simplified view that is easy to understand. To ensure the alert is easy to find and manage, the rule created in the embedded experience is captured and denoted in a group. All the storage events are simplified into one line, and a single rule is created on that event.
Power BI
Additional feedback indicated it was difficult to understand how creating a rule on a measure in a PBI visual translated over to Data Activator concepts.
In the previous version of Data Activator, when multiple rules are created and added to the same reflex, all the entities are mixed in, and it’s difficult to navigate.
In the new version of Data Activator, when each rule is created from an embedded rule creation experience, a group has been created and has a consistent structure. Each rule that has been created is kept in a separate, easy to read structure.
