Fabric RTI 101: What does Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence Provide?

Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence is a complete toolkit — an end-to-end set of capabilities that allow you to take streaming data, make sense of it, and act on it.

It starts with event ingestion. Fabric can connect to a wide range of streaming sources: Kafka, Azure Event Hubs, IoT Hub, and many others. That means whether your data is coming from IoT sensors, application logs, or business systems, you can bring it all into Fabric without a lot of custom wiring. Fabric RTI doesn’t force you to pick one source — it’s designed to be open and flexible.

Next, we have Eventstreams. Think of these as processing pipelines that can route, filter, and transform your events in motion. Eventstreams let you clean up the data, enrich it with context, and then distribute it to multiple destinations. For example, you could send some of the events straight into a real-time dashboard, others into a storage layer for later analysis, and at the same time trigger alerts on specific conditions. It’s a really powerful way to control how data flows through the system.

Then there’s real-time querying with KQL, the Kusto Query Language. If you’ve used SQL before, KQL will feel familiar but it’s optimized for large-scale log and telemetry data. With KQL, you can ask questions of your data streams as they arrive — not just after they’ve landed in a database. That’s a huge shift: you can detect patterns, spot anomalies, or monitor KPIs literally as the events are flowing. Fabric RTI also supports some SQL querying.

Fabric also includes Activator. This is where automation comes into play. Activator lets you define rules and patterns — for instance, if temperature goes above this threshold, trigger an alert, or if a sudden spike in transactions occurs, send a notification. Instead of just providing insights, the system can respond automatically, helping you close the loop between detection and action.

And finally, there’s native integration with Power BI and the rest of Fabric workloads. That’s a huge advantage because you don’t have to stitch together many separate tools. You can take streaming data, analyze it in real time, and visualize it directly in Power BI dashboards that are always live. You can also combine it with your historical batch data in Fabric — so you’re not choosing between past and present, you’re working with both in a unified way.

Fabric RTI really provides a complete toolkit: from ingestion to processing, querying, automation, and visualization — all under one umbrella. I think it’s a strong, yet currently underutilized platform for organizations that want to bring real-time capabilities into their data strategy.
 

Learn more about Fabric RTI

If you really want to learn about RTI right now, we have an online on-demand course that you can enrol in, right now. You’ll find it at Mastering Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

2026-01-17