Unlock the power of Real-Time Intelligence in the Era of AI: why Fabric Real-Time Intelligence is a game-changer
Since we announced the general availability of Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence in November 2024, the response from organizations worldwide has been extraordinary. Businesses across industries recognize the competitive advantage that comes from timely decisions and actions, understanding that every second, every event—and every detail—counts. Whether it’s tracking bags or shipments, optimizing hospital bed availability, promptly responding to customer needs, or managing restaurant-level inventory, real-time intelligence has shifted from being a niche aspiration to a strategic business imperative.
The integration of AI with real-time data amplifies the speed, accuracy, and effectiveness of these critical decisions, anticipating challenges, optimizing outcomes, seizing opportunities, and detecting anomalies that would otherwise pass unnoticed. AI augments human expertise in operations teams, freeing them to drive strategic, high-value decisions and innovation, rather than reacting to problems after they’ve occurred.
Today, momentum continues to build, Real-Time Intelligence is rapidly gaining traction within Microsoft Fabric, with 8.9k Fabric customers already leveraging it to sharpen their operational edge just months after becoming generally available. This widespread adoption underscores how deeply companies now value the ability to capture granular insights and translate them into immediate, impactful actions. These businesses recognize that competitive differentiation comes not just from insight itself, but from the speed and precision of their responses. In this era where disruption is constant and consumer expectations continue to rise, the organizations that master real-time intelligence are setting the pace for their industries.
With ready-to-deploy solutions for both developers and non-developers, Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric is designed to remove complexity, accelerate decision-making, and unlock new levels of agility. But despite its transformative potential, organizations still have questions, let’s explore some of the most common ones.
Does every industry really need time-sensitive, high granularity data?
Many people assume that real-time data is primarily useful for industries like finance, manufacturing, or IoT-heavy sectors. But in my experience working with customers, I’ve seen real-time intelligence making a significant impact across all industries. In today’s fast-moving business landscape, I’ve seen firsthand how organizations that act with speed and precision gain a substantial competitive edge.
Take a leading hospital chain, for example. Real-Time Intelligence has enabled this healthcare provider to improve bed availability for its patients by detecting patterns and behaviors from granular, minute-level data in real-time versus limited views into its operations with aggregates that can span only a few days. Unearthing these patterns has allowed this provider to refine its bed cleaning and preparation operations as well as patient discharge and admission processes.
Every organization is looking to maximize the value from every dollar spent on marketing and customer acquisition. IWG, the global leader in hybrid working, is using Real-Time Intelligence to move from corrective approaches to preventative measures from their call center interactions to identify the right actions to increase the conversion rate. Read more about the IWG solution.
No matter the industry, the ability to respond to changing conditions in real time is becoming a key driver of success.
Real-time challenges have been around for a while—what’s been holding organizations back from solving them?
I often hear organizations express the need for real-time intelligence, yet many struggle to implement it. Historically, adoption has been limited by fragmented, complex data landscapes. Without an end-to-end real-time solution, businesses have had to build custom architectures that are difficult to scale and maintain. Data silos, multiple technology stacks, and a lack of seamless AI integration have made real-time analytics a challenge.
I now see the evolution from fragmentation to integration firsthand – a leading airline is unifying their data stack comprising of 4 different vendor products into Real-Time Intelligence to act and react on passenger events to ensure that its customers receive best-in-class experience.
Traditional approaches often rely on batch processing, which means insights arrive too late to drive immediate action. Because of this, I’ve seen many businesses continue to operate with outdated data, missing critical opportunities where real-time insights could make a measurable difference.
Iceland Foods, a UK based retailer, has moved from batch processing of its point-of-sale transactions to more real-time streaming to offer real-time insights to its store managers to ensure adequate stock levels.
Isn’t implementing Real-Time Intelligence too complicated and expensive?
A common concern I hear is that adopting real-time intelligence requires significant investment in infrastructure and technical expertise. However, Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence is designed to make this process much simpler.
Sanjeev Lakkaraju, Senior Director at Hanwha Qcells, a leading clean energy solutions provider, underlines the importance of simplicity and cost reinvestment. “We used to spend countless hours in building pipelines with a multitude of products to serve growing demand of their business to generate real-time insights. Upon self-discovering Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, we have been able to shift our focus from building data pipelines to deriving insights from the data and in the process, democratizing real-time intelligence for our users.”
By utilizing Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, a global leader in building technologies achieved nearly 60% cost reduction compared to a competitor by eliminating background jobs, and unifying on a common tech stack when collecting telemetry from their large assets. Not only did they achieve cost efficiencies, but they also gained 40% improvement in query performance leading to better customer experience. Their customer uses these insights to reduce downtime, have fewer disruptions and gain better efficiencies.
So, what is Real-Time Intelligence?
Real-Time Intelligence is composed of several different items in Microsoft Fabric that provide the necessary tools for your end-to-end solution.
Eventstreams make it easy to ingest and process data. Through Activator, users can quickly monitor conditions and take action when certain patterns are detected.
Eventhouse, KQL querysets, and Real-Time Dashboards make it easy to understand and investigate this data at massive scale, even if you don’t know how to write queries. And with the Real-Time hub, users can discover, manage and leverage all their streaming data sources, within Microsoft and across different clouds. The data ultimately flows into OneLake, making it available across all the different Fabric workloads and engines.
On top of all this data – you have a layer of AI designed to make interacting and gaining actionable insights as easy as chatting with a friend.
Key announcements and features at FabCon Vegas 2025
Several exciting announcements were made in the areas of developer readiness, security, and general improvements. For more information, refer to What’s new and planned for Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric documentation.
Developer ready
- New streaming and event connectors for Eventstreams (Preview):
- MQTT connector: Connect to an MQTT broker, subscribe to specific topics, and stream data from those topics into Eventstream.
- Solace PubSub+: Read messages from a Solace PubSub+ Event Broker cluster and stream them into Eventstream for real-time data processing.
- Azure Data Explorer: Streams data from an Azure Data Explorer database in real-time into Fabric.
- Real-time Weather: Ingest live weather data for a selected city into Eventstream, including temperature, humidity, and wind speed.
- Azure Event Grid namespace: Stream MQTT, IoT, or any messages from Azure Event Grid namespace to Eventstream.
- Sample data streams: Kickstart your streaming projects with additional pre-built sample streams, including real-time bus tracking data and S&P 500 stock market data.
These new connectors unlock a world of possibilities for data integration and analytics. To learn more about real-time streaming and processing in Fabric Eventstream, be sure to check out our detailed documentation.
- Multiple schema set support in Eventstream:
- Multiple-Schema support in Eventstream supports inferring multiple schemas from various sources, enabling you to design different data transformation paths by picking up one of them with rich flexibility. With support for multiple schemas in Eventstream, you can:
- Leverage various inferred schemas for diverse transformation paths
- View and update the inferred schema(s)
- Well-organized data preview
- Map schema to source
- Multiple-Schema support in Eventstream supports inferring multiple schemas from various sources, enabling you to design different data transformation paths by picking up one of them with rich flexibility. With support for multiple schemas in Eventstream, you can:
- Data Preview for Apache Kafka, Confluent Kafka, and Amazon Kinesis:
- Eventstream’s Confluent Cloud Kafka streaming connector is capable of decoding data produced with Confluent serializer.
- Azure and Fabric Events GA:
- Azure and Fabric Events offer a capability within Real-Time Intelligence that enables you to Ingest events that are generated in Microsoft Fabric and Azurelike OneLake events, Azure blob storage events, Job events,Workspace item events. You can filter those events using rich filtering capabilities on event schema properties and integrate those events to consumers in Microsoft Fabric like Activator for setting event-based alerts or Eventstream to stream events to other destinations.
- With Azure and Fabric Events, organizations can reduce latency, improve operational efficiency, and build scalable event-driven applications.
- To learn more, refer to the Azure and Fabric Events documentation.
- Real-Time Intelligence now fully GA in CI/CD with Eventstreams CI/CD, and ALM GA:
- Collaborating on data streaming solutions can be challenging, especially when multiple developers work on the same Eventstream item. Version control challenges, deployment inefficiencies, and conflicts often slow down development. Now, we’re excited to announce the general availability (GA) of CI/CD and REST APIs—making these capabilities even more accessible and powerful for all users.
- Key benefits of leveraging CI/CD tools in Eventstream include enhanced collaboration, streamlined deployments, automated workflows, and increased productivity.
- Overall, the GA of CI/CD and REST APIs for Fabric Eventstream empowers users to achieve a more efficient, reliable, and collaborative development experience.
- To learn more about Eventstream CI/CD, refer to the documentation: Eventstream CI/CD – Git Integration and Deployment pipeline, and Eventstream REST API.
Secure
- Managed Private endpoint (Preview):
- Managed Private Endpoint (MPE) is a Fabric platform security feature that allows Fabric items, such as Eventstream, to securely connect to data sources behind firewalls or protected networks. Since we introduced this integration last year, many customers have relied on it to establish secure outbound connections between Eventstream and their data sources.
- This feature ensures that your data is transmitted securely over a private network, allowing you to fully harness the power of real-time streaming and high-performance data processing in Eventstream.
- To learn more about Managed Private Endpoints, refer to: Connect to Azure resources securely using MPE in Eventstream.
- Entra ID support for custom Eventstream endpoint (Preview):
- This feature enhances security by eliminating the need for SAS keys or connection strings, reducing the risk of unauthorized access. Instead, Entra ID authentication ensures that user permissions are directly tied to Fabric workspace access, allowing only authorized users to send and fetch data from Eventstream.
- Additionally, if you’re using an Azure resource like Azure Logic Apps with a system-assigned or user-managed identity, you can now assign Fabric workspace permissions to that identity. This enables Azure Logic Apps to seamlessly connect to Eventstream using Managed Identity authentication.
- To learn more about Entra ID authentication in Eventstream’s Custom Endpoint, check the Connect to Eventstream using Microsoft Entra ID authentication
General improvements
- Activator Alert Management in Power BI
- It’s now easier than ever to create and manage Activator alerts on your Power BI reports. We’ve redesigned the Power BI ‘Set Alert’ experience so that you can conveniently manage your alerts entirely within your reports, without having to open Activator. We’ve also streamlined the experience so that you can set up an alert with fewer steps.
- KQL Database Entity Diagram
- Visualize the relationship between all items in your KQL database, including tables, shortcuts, functions, and update policies.
Stay tuned for more!
We are committed to delivering regular updates and new features to Real-Time Intelligence with our ongoing Fabric releases. You can sign up for a free trial and start exploring the benefits of streaming data analytics and action.
Read the other blog from Arun Ulag to hear more about Real-Time Intelligence and the rest of the Fabric announcements from this week.
The journey does not stop here, there will be many more exciting developments as we continue to innovate and expand the capabilities of Real-Time Intelligence. Learn more about all the features and follow a step-by-step tutorial. Join the conversation at Join the conversation and vote for your favorite features.
Over the next month, we will release a series of blog posts that dive into all the capabilities further. Stay tuned to for more!
