Real-Time Dashboards in Microsoft Fabric help you monitor live data and react to changes as they happen. Today, we're announcing a new feature that automatically refreshes your dashboard visuals when new data is ingested into the dashboard’s underlying data sources.
With Live Refresh, your dashboards stay current without the overhead of constant polling. Instead of refreshing on a fixed schedule regardless of whether new data exists, Live Refresh detects when data arrives and triggers a refresh only when needed.
Live refresh status
The challenge with fixed-interval refresh
When monitoring real-time data, you want your dashboards to reflect the latest information. Traditional approaches rely on fixed-interval refresh-polling your data source every few seconds or minutes to check for updates. While this works, it creates a tradeoff: shorter intervals mean fresher data, but higher compute costs and system load; longer intervals reduce costs but delay when you see new information.
For scenarios involving high-frequency data streams or large-scale monitoring across multiple sources, this tradeoff becomes more challenging. You might need near-instant visibility into incoming data, but running heavy visual queries every few seconds isn't practical or cost-effective.
How Live Refresh helps
Live refresh takes a different approach. Rather than running full visual queries on a fixed schedule, it uses a lightweight background query to detect when new data has been ingested. If new data is detected, the dashboard refreshes the affected visuals. If no new data has arrived, no additional queries will be run.
Live refresh infographics
This event-driven model means your dashboards refresh promptly when it matters—when new data actually arrives—while avoiding unnecessary queries during quiet periods. The result is a more responsive experience with reduced compute overhead.
Visual refresh indicator
For dashboard viewers, Live Refresh also provides flexibility. If you're investigating a specific data point and don't want the visuals to change, you can pause Live Refresh temporarily. While paused, the dashboard doesn't perform automated refreshes, letting you analyze the current state without interruption. When you're ready, resume Live Refresh to return to real-time monitoring.
View can pause and resume live refresh
Use cases
Live Refresh is particularly valuable in scenarios such as:
- High-frequency data monitoring: When you need to see data the moment it arrives, Live refresh ensures your dashboard reflects new information as soon as it's ingested without the cost of constant polling.
- Cost optimization: For organizations running multiple dashboards or monitoring large data volumes, Live refresh reduces compute load by eliminating unnecessary refresh cycles during periods without new data.
- Large-scale monitoring: When monitoring multiple data sources, Live refresh allows the system to refresh only the visuals that have new underlying data, rather than refreshing everything on a fixed schedule.
Getting Started
Dashboard editors can enable Live Refresh through the dashboard settings (Manage). The configuration options let you choose between Live Refresh (recommended) or Manual refresh only.
With Live Refresh, you can set a fallback refresh interval for visuals that don't support ingestion detection and set a minimum time for new data polling.
Refresh settings pane
Next Steps
Learn more: Explore the Real-Time Dashboard documentation for guidance on creating and customizing dashboards.
Submit ideas: Share feature requests through the Microsoft Fabric Ideas forum.
Provide feedback: Let us know what you think in the Fabric Community.
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