If you haven’t already, check out Arun Ulag’s hero blog “FabCon and SQLCon 2026: Unifying databases and Fabric on a single, complete platform” for a complete look at all of our FabCon and SQLCon announcements across both Fabric and our database offerings.
Co-Author: James Hutton
In our data-centric society, immediate responses have become a necessity rather than a choice. Fabric Activator for Microsoft Fabric enables organizations to move from passive monitoring to proactive action. By continuously monitoring streaming and event data, Activator helps you to automatically execute actions or send alerts whenever specific data conditions are met, ensuring timely and efficient operations.
Whether it’s tracking operational metrics, monitoring business events, or identifying anomalies as they happen, Fabric Activator turns live data into intelligent, automated responses without complex code or custom infrastructure.
What’s new
Activator is now richer with more actions! You can now run these new actions from your Activator rules: Send Teams message to Group chat, Send Teams message to Teams channel, Run Spark job, Run User Data Function, and Run Dataflow.Running User Data Functions (UDFs) from your Activator rules enables fast, programmatic responses when issues occur. For example, you can automatically create a support ticket, incident, or work item when a threshold is exceeded, passing along the context such as entity IDs, measured values, and timestamps. UDFs can also trigger predefined actions like restarting a service, adjusting a configuration, or invoking an internal automation or runbook, helping teams respond quickly and consistently without manual intervention and integrate Activator directly into existing operational workflows.
Running Spark jobs and Dataflows helps ensure data freshness by reacting to Fabric events and Azure Blob Storage events that are emitted when data changes. Instead of relying solely on scheduled refreshes, Activator rules can trigger data processing, transformations, or refreshes as soon as source data is updated. This reduces latency between data changes and insights and enables more responsive, event‑driven data pipelines across your Fabric environment.
Figure 1: Actions available for automations in Fabric Activator.
Create intelligent, configurable rules to monitor Data Warehouse health and business-critical signals in real time.
You can create rules (Preview) on ad-hoc or saved SQL queries, define evaluation frequency and set rule conditions based on query results.
Learn more with the Create an alert rule on a Fabric Warehouse SQL query documentation.
Figure 2: Configure rules in Data Warehouse.
Business Events capture critical business moments and enable actions for immediate response and better decision making so that organizations can operate more intelligently, and scale real time decision making across analytics, automation, and AI. With ‘set alert’ in Business events, you can now alert and automate business processes & actions.
Learn more with the Consume business events from Activator documentation.
Figure 3: Alert and automate actions in Business Events.
You can define conditions and actions on top of your business entities in Ontology. Rules transform ontology from static information models to operationalized ones. The ontology becomes capable of automatically initiating business processes through alerts (preview) and automated actions, all within a seamless and context-aware environment. This feature helps you unlock automation capabilities without needing to switch between tools or write custom code, to streamline workflows and enhance efficiency.
Learn more with the Rules in ontology (preview) (with Fabric Activator) documentation.
Figure 4: Configure rules on entities in Ontology.
Add/manage rules inside an Eventstream
Previously, setting up an alert required switching from Eventstream to Activator. While powerful, this meant moving between experiences to complete a single workflow. Now, alert creation is embedded directly into Eventstream.Learn more with the Add a Fabric activator destination to an eventstream documentation.
Figure 6: Manage rules inside Eventstream.
Enhanced Activator’s integration with Power BI to support one of the most requested alerting scenarios: notifying you when a new row appears in a table visual.
Many customers track operational issues, such as customer complaints, support tickets, or software bugs, as rows in Power BI tables, and want to be alerted when a new issue appears. With this update, Activator can notify you when this happens so that you can respond quickly. To try it out, select “Set Alert” on a table visual in a published Power BI report.
Learn more about this in the Create an alert in Power BI report documentation.
Figure 7: New alerting scenario in Power BI.