Fabric RTI 101: What is Ingestion?

Ingestion is the very first step in any real-time architecture: getting events from wherever they originate and bringing them into where they can be processed, analyzed, and acted on.

Events typically start their lives in all kinds of different systems. They might come from Kafka topics in an enterprise environment, AMQP brokers in messaging-based systems, or from Azure-native services like Event Hubs or IoT Hub, which are especially common in cloud and IoT scenarios. Ingestion is what connects those sources into Fabric. Without it, you don’t have anything to work with.

Within Fabric, ingestion is managed through Eventstreams. Eventstreams allow you to define inputs — where the events are coming from — and outputs — where those events should flow once they’re inside Fabric. Think of Eventstreams as the plumbing layer: they take data from multiple sources, make sure it flows in correctly, and then pass it downstream for transformation, storage, or real-time querying.

Now, ingestion isn’t just about connecting a source. It’s more than that. First, it needs to scale — because events often arrive at very high volume and velocity. You don’t want the ingestion pipeline to become a bottleneck. Second is reliability. If ingestion fails, you lose events, and that means you lose facts about what really happened. In many use cases — financial transactions, sensor readings, security logs — that’s unacceptable. And third, there’s often a need to preserve ordering. If two events occur in sequence, we usually want to process them in that same order, even if they were generated by different devices or came in through different network paths.

It’s very common for events to arrive out-of-order or late. But you still need to be able to process them sensibly.

Ingestion is the foundation of everything else in real-time intelligence. If you can’t get the events in reliably, at scale, and in order, then it doesn’t matter how clever your analytics or automation is further downstream. Good ingestion design is what enables everything else to function smoothly in Fabric.
 

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

2026-01-23