Fabric RTI 101: Creating Real-Time Dashboards
While Power BI remains a fantastic visualization tool for business reporting, and we’ll talk more about it later, Fabric Real-Time Intelligence also includes its own built-in real-time dashboards — designed specifically for operational monitoring and live analytics.
These dashboards are native to the Real-Time Intelligence workspace. They connect directly to KQL Databases or Eventhouses, and they display query results that automatically refresh — often in near real time, with sub-second latency.
Instead of building datasets or reports in a reporting tool like Power BI, you start with a KQL Queryset — a collection of KQL queries that define what data you want to monitor. Each query can be visualized immediately within the Fabric portal as charts, gauges, or tables. Those visuals are then pinned together into a Real-Time Dashboard.
This approach is great for operational teams that need to watch live telemetry — for example, event throughput, error rates, or IoT readings — without waiting for scheduled refreshes or report publishing cycles.
Because the dashboards are built directly on top of KQL queries, they respond almost instantly to incoming data. You can pause, zoom into time windows, or filter interactively to drill into anomalies or spikes as they happen.
The key distinction is that Fabric Real-Time Dashboards are lightweight, live-monitoring tools, while Power BI dashboards are broader, analytic tools that combine real-time and historical data. In practice, you’ll often use both: Fabric Real-Time Dashboards for immediate, in-the-moment visibility Power BI for longer-term trend analysis and business reporting Together, they form a complete insight cycle — from raw streaming events to visualized intelligence, all within the Fabric ecosystem.
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
2026-06-28