Real-Time Intelligence with Microsoft Fabric

Chapter 8. Activator

As modern organizations migrate from batch-oriented to real-time analytics, they collaborate on event-based architectures, in which they treat data as a stream of events, rather than a single data point for analysis. Systems can react sooner because time is only an event in the data stream they react to, rather than something they analyze at fixed intervals.

This kind of streaming data thinking is critical for today’s organizations, regardless of the industry they are in. We see this during operation processes such as manufacturing, operational anomaly detection, and fraud detection in financial institutions.

The business need for event-based architectures is apparent: we need to prevent issues and potentially capitalize on opportunities through near-real-time analysis, driven by detection and automation rather than traditional retrospective analysis. Consider for a moment that with an event-based architecture, you could detect a spike in a machine’s temperature based on a threshold, or a dip in sales as it is happening, not hours or days later.

Activator is the center of the Microsoft Fabric real-time analytics narrative, as the connector between passive observation of data and proactive behavior. In this chapter, you’ll explore how to use Activator to create automated reactions to changes or patterns in your data. In the following sections, we will delve deeper into the technical architecture of Activator, explore how to define effective rules, and examine ...