Data Activator for Actionable Insights in Fabric

Since early 2024, Microsoft Fabric has been the new talk of the town. Announced as one end-to-end analytics and data platform – one SaaS (Software as a Service) solution offering a deep integration between existing and new components from the Microsoft stack. Needless to say, everyone wanted to get their hands on it and explore the capabilities.

Now, several months after Fabric became generally available, we have successfully delivered on the first client projects using the different services which Fabric has to offer. However, during these projects we noticed that one component remained in the shadows, namely Data Activator.

The fact that it is still a preview feature will definitely play a role in this. Nevertheless, we wanted to explore for ourselves which state it is currently in and whether or not we can wholeheartedly recommend it to our clients at this point in time.

What is Data Activator?

Microsoft likes using the analogy of Data Activator being like a nervous system for your data. With Fabric being a unified platform, Data Activator is able to track and perform actions on any changes to your data, at any scale, in a timely manner.

Additionally, it offers the user a no-code environment to set up triggers (or reflex items) on how to act if the nervous system detects a pre-defined pattern across the data, if a certain threshold is exceeded or if a condition is met.

Prerequisites for using Data Activator

To be able to use the functionalities of Data Activator you need the following:

• Data Activator needs to be enabled by your tenant admin in the Admin Portal since this is still a preview feature.
• The workspace where you want to create the Data Activator items (e.g. Reflex Item) needs to be a Fabric workspace.
• Your user will need to have a Fabric license.

Core concepts of Data Activator

Before continuing this blog post it is vital that we explain some of the core building blocks of Data Activator:

• Objects: An object is something for which you want to monitor the associated properties. It can be virtually anything. It can be an Account Manager, Invoice, …
• Properties: These are the attributes to your object. Associated info or measurements to the object in question.
• Events: Data Activator considers all data sources to be streams of events. An event is hereby an observation about the state of an object.
• Triggers: A trigger defines the conditions which need to be checked in the data and what action has to be executed if said condition is met.

How does Data Activator work?

Firstly, we need to tell Data Activator which data we want to monitor before we can configure how to act on certain events. There are two categories of data which Data Activator can track: PowerBI datasets and Event Streams.

(A third option would be Real-Time Dashboards but these are still in preview at the time of writing and therefore we chose to omit them.)

PowerBI datasets

To have data in a semantic model you first need to make sure to publish your dataset and report to the Fabric workspace. Once that is done you open your report.

Using any of the three buttons in the screenshot below will allow you to start configuring your first alert in the pane on the right. Keep in mind that an alert can only be set on a visual which includes a measure.

Admittedly, the options available here are not much more than standard PowerBI alerts. (see later in the article for more details) But it is a necessary step before we get to see the real power of Data Activator. With this, you create a Reflex item in your workspace which you can later tailor to your specific needs.

Event streams

Although Data Activator treats all data sources as streams of events there is a different approach for making streaming data available in your Reflex item compared to PowerBI datasets.

In the Fabric workspace we need to create a new Eventstream item. Within this item there are a few options to choose for your source data. There are also different destination types available but for this article Reflex item is the one we need.

Configuring your Reflex item

Whether you use Eventstreams or PowerBI semantic models the way to configure your trigger and consequent action is the same.

The first step is to create an Object. This happens within the data tab where we name the object, define the key column and list all attributes which we will need in our trigger.

Once we have defined an object which we want to track we can create a new trigger. This happens in the design tab.

The trigger will ask us to specify three configurations:

• Select: Which attribute of our object do we want to track?
• Detect: Which condition/pattern do we want to check for our selected attribute?
• Act: Which action should be triggered when the condition is detected?

* We have deliberately chosen options to showcase as much of the functionality as possible into one image. Not because this combination would make sense in a business context.

Firstly, you can select which attribute you want to monitor and pre-filter your data if you want to monitor only a subset of the records.

Secondly, you can set the condition which needs to be monitored for your data. As you can see from the screenshot, the conditions you can add are fairly advanced and should allow you to set up the trigger exactly as you want.

Lastly, you can configure the action which needs to be triggered when the condition is satisfied. You can choose to send an email, a Teams message, trigger a Fabric item or activate a workflow through Power Automate.

Once you are happy with the configuration of your Trigger you can save it by clicking in the ribbon on top. It is also possible to send yourself a test alert to make sure you configured the alert properly. Once you are happy with the outcome of your trigger you can then start it in the top hand menu.

How is it better than existing alerting features?

Let’s compare existing alerting capabilities versus Data Activator:

PowerBI

• Currently PowerBI can only apply alerting to three types of visuals (KPI, card and gauge) and can only do this if those visuals are in dashboards (not reports). Data Activator can create a Reflex on reports and on any type of visual as long as it contains a measure.
• Conditions in PowerBI to trigger alerts are very basic whereas the options available in Data Activator are much more complex.
• Data Activator offers the possibility to send a Teams message or run a Fabric item as standard where in PowerBI you would need to set up a Power Automate workflow to do this.

Event streams

To the best of our knowledge there’s no existing standard functionality within the Microsoft stack to configure alerting on streaming data. Hence, Data Activator could be a big step forward when becoming generally available.

Can we recommend using it in a production environment at this point in time?

During our testing we have encountered a number of features which did not work or were inconsistent throughout our tests. We will list some of them below but the accumulation of those different shortcomings leads to us not being able to recommend Data Activator to our clients yet in a production environment.

We would also like to stress again that this feature is still in preview at the time of writing and such flaws, as we will mention hereafter, are therefore to be expected.

• When setting an alert on a PowerBI dataset, a reflex item is created as well as an object. Our data never got properly reflected in this object. Our workaround was therefore to delete the object from the design tab and create a new one ourselves through the data tab.
• Configuring your trigger to send an email to two addressees did not work for us. Only the first name received the message.
• When the condition matches multiple records the addressee only receives one message with only the details of the first record which was matched.
• We manipulated our data between two runs of the trigger. We deleted all existing records and added 10 new ones of which 5 matched our condition. The trigger did recognize that 10 new records were added but failed to send a message.
• When using a PowerBI semantic model as a data source the trigger runs once every hour which cannot be changed. While this is not a bug, we did notice that our 10 records get appended to our object every hour when none of the records changed.
• This same issue led to a second observation. An inconsistency when the trigger is activated. We prepared a semantic model with 10 records. When originally configuring our Trigger we received no email. After one hour the records were appended again even though we did not change them and then we did receive an email. Two more refreshes later and we still have not gotten a second email.
• As you create your Object in the data tab you are asked to specify a key column e.g. invoice_id. The column you select here cannot be used in the configuration of your trigger. It is unusual not to be able to include your key in the email you trigger.
• The person receiving the email receives a link to “manage alert” which we don’t believe business users should have access to.
• In the configuration of the trigger you can manually filter on IDs in your key field. The number of records shown here does not align with the total number of records in our dataset. (The data tab does show us all 10.000 were correctly imported but the design tab tells us only 5002 were.) It also does not allow us to search or to select all IDs.

How we would like to see Data Activator evolve

Other than fixing the issues as mentioned above we have some ideas how to expand the capabilities of Data Activator which we believe would make the tool even more indispensable.

• Add the options to use lakehouses and warehouses directly as a source to monitor changes in data. 
• It would be useful to be able to directly insert the full semantic layer of the Power BI model as a data activator source to be able to configure alerts on the whole model instead of a selected subset of parameters from a visual. 
• To no longer receive one email with only the first record which matches the trigger criteria but to receive one email with a list of all the records which matched.
• Instead of including a button in the email redirecting the user to the configuration of the reflex item it would be more useful to point it to the visual or part of the data that triggered the action. 
• An option to choose the frequency with which the reflex item should be refreshed. Not have it hardcoded at 1 hour.

Conclusion

To conclude we again want to emphasize that Data Activator is still in preview state and the functionalities are accordingly mature.

That being said, we truly believe in the potential of Data Activator and the value it can add for your business. With the ever-increasing volumes and complexity of data it will be vital to have the means to monitor and act on the incoming data in a timely manner.

The fast-paced evolution of Fabric, which we have seen in the past few months, is keeping our hopes up that Data Activator will be granted the same development efforts in the near future.

If you have any questions about Data Activator or Microsoft Fabric, please do not hesitate to contact Lytix and we will happily help you in your journey.

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