Handling late and out-of-order events in Eventstream windows and Eventhouse aggregations?
I'm coming from Apache Flink, where late and out-of-order events are handled with event-time watermarks and allowed lateness. I'm trying to understand the equivalent approach in Fabric Real-Time Intelligence. Scenario: IoT devices send telemetry with an event timestamp. Because of network delays, some events arrive several minutes late, and occasionally out of order. I need accurate 5-minute aggregates (average and max per device) for dashboards and Activator rules. Questions: Eventstream: when using windowed aggregations (tumbling or hopping), are windows based on event time or arrival time? Is there a setting for out-of-order tolerance or late-arrival handling, and what happens to events that arrive after a window has closed: are they dropped, or do they produce a corrected result? Eventhouse: if I aggregate in Eventhouse instead, for example with a materialized view using bin(EventTime, 5m), are late events included automatically when they arrive? Any caveats with materialized views and late data? Which layer is better for aggregations when correctness under late data matters more than lowest latency? Activator: if a rule has already fired on an aggregate that later gets corrected by late data, is there a pattern for handling that, or should rules only run on finalized windows?
Global Aircraft✈️ Live Tracking with Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence
In this blog, I’ll walk you through, build a real-time global flight tracking system. We will ingest live flight data from the public OpenSky Network API using a Python polling script, stream it through Microsoft Fabric Eventstream into an Eventhouse (KQL Database), transform the dense raw arrays using KQL update policies and visualize the results on a Real-Time Dashboard complete with maps, KPIs and analytical charts. Prerequisites: Valid Fabric Capacity / Trail License Knowledge on Python Knowledge on KQL Step1: Setup Workspace & Eventhouse (KQL Database) Created a workspace “FlightTracking-[WS]” Created an eventhouse “FLightTracking-EH” Create a raw ingestion table “RawFlightbatc” in KQL Databse Step 2: Setup a Fabric Eventstream Created a Eventstream “GlobalFlightStream” and select ‘Use custom endpoint’ Click ‘Add’ Click on ‘Publish’ Copy the ‘Event hub name’ and ‘connection string-primary key’ into notepad Step 3: Notebook Creation and Setup Python script Created a notebook. Make sure select Python Install azure eventhub package Let’s go back to eventstream and add destination by selecting ‘Eventhouse’ Configure all details and click on save Comeback to Notebook and insert the Python script which is having all the connection strings / passwords etc. Run the notebook Now notebook started running and sending the data to eventstream Data is loaded into eventstream and Click on Publish Now eventstream is ‘Live’ Data is loading into KQL Database Step 4: Regularizing Data with KQL & Update Policies Create a cleaned table “FlightStates” Create the parsing function and update policy Alter table with updated policy Step 5: Building Real-Time Dashboard Click on Realtime dashboard and give a name “FlightOperationsDashboard” Now click on edit Run the below code to get total active flights count Change the chart to Stat and rename, click on Apply KPI added and click on Add visual and take new Stat visual Insert the code and run to get India Origin Flights and Format it and click Apply In the same way, I built other KPIs Select Map Chart Run the below code and Fill all details and Click on Apply. Here we’re calculating Flights trend We can see chart added to Dashboard Select a Bar chart Run the below code, fill all details and click on apply to add Bar chart to Dashboard. Here we’re getting the top 10 countries by aircrafts Run the below code, fill all details and click on apply to add Column chart to Dashboard. Here we’re categorizing the baro-altitude which is critical for airport delay predection Run the below code, fill all details and click on apply to add Pie chart to Dashboard. It splits the aircraft parked versus those actively flying Together, these visuals transform raw flight telemetry into an operational monitoring experience. Key takeaways: Fabric Eventstream provides a streamlined way to ingest external real-time feeds. Eventhouse/KQL Database provides a real-time analytical environment for flight telemetry. KQL mv-expand simplifies the processing of nested flight-state arrays. Update Policies automate transformation from raw streaming data into structured analytical data. KQL geospatial functions enable location-based flight analysis. Real-Time Dashboards transform streaming telemetry into actionable operational insights. Conclusion: This project demonstrates how Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence can be used to build an end-to-end real-time aircraft tracking solution. we can transform continuously arriving aircraft telemetry into meaningful real-time insights. Do you want to replicate? Get Code file from my GitHub link You can find all the KQL queries, update policy functions, and the complete Python polling script in the official GitHub repository below: [Download from here] Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere gratitude to @SuryaTejaJosyul , @minniwalia and @rajendraongole1 for their continuous guidance and support throughout this Real-Time Intelligence (RTI) implementation. Their insights and encouragement played a key role in helping me complete this solution successfull Happy learning! — Inturi Suparna Babu [LinkedIn]Fabric Business Events: what delivery guarantees and replay pattern should we design for?
Hi all, I am testing the newer Business Events capability in Fabric Real-Time Intelligence and trying to understand what reliability assumptions should be made for a production design. The pattern I am looking at is roughly: Eventstream → Business Event → Activator → downstream action / User Data Function with Eventhouse enabled so the published business events are also retained for historical analysis. The current documentation explains the publisher/consumer model and shows how Eventstream can publish a governed business event that Activator then consumes. What I have not been able to find clearly documented is the delivery contract between the published business event and its consumers. A few things I am trying to clarify: If an Activator consumer or downstream action is temporarily unavailable, does Fabric retry delivery of the business event? Should consumers assume at-least-once delivery and therefore be designed to handle duplicate events, or is a different delivery model used? Is event ordering guaranteed in any scope, for example for events from the same Eventstream publisher? Since published business events can also be retained automatically in Eventhouse, is that retained history intended to support replay/reprocessing after a consumer outage, or is it primarily an analytical record and replay would need to be implemented separately? Are there documented retry or delivery-retention windows that should be considered when designing an operational workflow? I am mainly trying to understand what a resilient production pattern should look like when the business event triggers something with side effects, where processing the same event twice or silently missing an event would matter. Would you generally make the downstream consumer idempotent and treat Eventhouse as an audit/recovery store, or is there a more Fabric-native pattern for this? Interested to hear how others are approaching this with Business Events and Activator.
Handling Multiple Schemas in Eventstream for Azure Event Hub and Azure IOT Hub data sources
One of the challenges with streaming data is that data comes in a variety of schemas, which can be dynamic and are not always predictable. As applications and data structures change, schema values can sometimes be wildly different across devices or event inputs. Recently a customer reached out with several questions on this common problem. With the capabilities in Fabric Real Time Intelligence we can flexibly ingest this data. Enough of the background let’s get to the problem!Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric
Join Microsoft Fabric Builders Hub Hyderabad for our first official community event featuring Rajendra Ongole. Discover how Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric enables organizations to collect, process, analyze, and act on streaming data with minimal latency. Whether you're a student, beginner, Power BI enthusiast, aspiring data engineer, or early-career professional, this session will introduce the fundamentals of real-time analytics and demonstrate how Microsoft Fabric simplifies building modern, data-driven solutions. In this session, you'll learn about: • What Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric is • Key components and architecture • Eventstreams and real-time data ingestion • Building real-time analytics solutions • Practical use cases and demonstrations • Best practices and learning resources • Live Q&A with the speaker Who should attend? • Students • Beginners exploring Microsoft Fabric • Power BI enthusiasts • Aspiring Data Engineers • Data Analysts • Early-career professionals We look forward to welcoming you to the inaugural event of Microsoft Fabric Builders Hub Hyderabad!
