What is the difference between Real-Time Intelligence and comparable Azure solutions?

As organizations progress in their digital transformation journey, they encounter an increasing number of data sources. These sources generate time-sensitive, intricate data points, events, and signals. This data can originate from various sources such as (a) sensor data from physical assets like plants, vehicles, towers, IoT Edge devices, (b) change data capture (CDC) streams from databases powering customer-facing web and mobile applications, and (c) logs from on-premises and cloud infrastructure and applications, among others. These data streams are crucial for organizations to close the digital feedback loop, gain a deeper understanding of customer usage patterns of their physical and digital assets, and continually enhance the value they provide to maintain market competitiveness.

Realizing this value necessitates the construction of real-time data streaming architectures that use both cloud-based and on-premises data services for data capture, transport, operational transformations, and analytical transformations. These architectures are typically built using a mix of products such as Azure Event Hubs, Azure Event Grid, Apache Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, IBM Message Queues, and Google Pub/Sub. As the data arrives in the cloud, it undergoes various stages of processing and transformation, often referred to as hot, warm, and cold paths, before landing in data stores like Azure Data Explorer, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Lake Store Gen 2. Once processed, this data is ready for advanced analytics and AI applications and can be visualized using tools like Power BI, Grafana, Web or Mobile Apps, and API endpoints.

The introduction of Real-Time Intelligence in Fabric offers organizations multiple implementation approaches and architectures for their use cases that require advanced analytics of streaming data. Microsoft Azure equips professional developers with robust capabilities to design and implement architectures that necessitate deep integration with other Azure services, end-to-end automation, and deployment of the entire solution as a unified package. Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric enables citizen developers and business users to discover data streams within their organizations and build their analytical solutions and applications. With seamless integration with Azure Event Hubs, Azure Event Grid, and Azure Data Explorer, Real-Time Intelligence facilitates the extension of Azure-based architectures into Microsoft Fabric and the creation of new solutions using existing or new data sources. The following diagram illustrates both Azure Platform as a service (PaaS) based solution architecture and Real-Time Intelligence solution architecture for telemetry analytics use cases in typical manufacturing/automotive organizations.

For more information on Real-Time Intelligence, see What is Real-Time Intelligence in Fabric?.

Historically, organizations allocated substantial budgets, workforce, and resources to develop, integrate, deploy, sustain, and manage various disconnected cloud-based or on-premises products and isolated solutions. This has led to intricate, complex architectures that are challenging to operate and maintain. So, organizations have hesitated to pursue such investments due to the complexity, or have deemed the costs too prohibitive to justify a satisfactory return on investment. Yet, the demand for real-time business operation insights driven by immediate, high granularity data, has been consistent among end users.

Real-Time Intelligence revolutionizes this landscape by harnessing the full potential of real-time capabilities within Fabric, enabling you to derive valuable, actionable insights from your first-party and third-party data instantaneously. With Real-Time Intelligence, you benefit from:

• A comprehensive SaaS offering: An all-encompassing solution that facilitates the discovery of insights from your time-sensitive data, allowing you to ingest, process, query, visualize, and act upon it in real-time.
• A centralized hub for your dynamic data: A unified data estate for all your event data in motion, simplifying the ingestion, storage, and curation of fine-grained data from across your organization through the Real-Time Hub.
• Rapid solution development: Empower team members of varying expertise to extract more value from data and quickly build solutions on top it for further business growth.
• Insights powered by real-time AI: Scale manual monitoring and effortlessly initiate actions with ready-to-use, automated features that uncover hidden patterns, and fully use the Microsoft ecosystem to drive your business forward.

This article outlines key considerations for determining the most suitable implementation architecture tailored to your streaming use cases:

Overall

Capability	Azure PaaS-based solution	Real-time Intelligence solution
Integration of services	Depends on integration compatibility between the services in scope of the architecture.	One-click integration at each step of data ingestion, process, analyze, visualize, and act.
Pro and citizen dev experience	More suitable for pro developers.	Pro developers, citizen developers, and business users can coexist.
Low-code/No-code	Only available for transformation in Azure Stream Analytics and for creating alerts using Logics Apps or Power Automate. Pro development required for end to end implementation.	End-to-end implementation from ingestion to analyze to transform to visualize and act can be realized.
Consumption Model	Service dependent estimation, consumption, and billing model.	Uniform Fabric Capacity Unit consumption and billing model.

Ingest and process

Capability	Azure PaaS-based solution	Real-time Intelligence solution
Multicloud connectors	Azure Stream Analytics connects to Confluent Kafka. No connectors to read data from Amazon Kinesis or Google Pub/Sub.	Native integration for Confluent Kafka, Amazon Kinesis, Google Pub/Sub.
Support for CDC streams	Requires deployment of other services such as Debezium.	Native integration for Azure Cosmos DB, Postgresql, and Azure SQL.
Support for protocols	Azure Event Hubs, AMQP, Kafka, and MQTT.	Azure Event Hubs, AMQP, Kafka.

Analyze & transform

Capability	Azure PaaS-based solution	Real-time Intelligence solution
Data profiling	Not available	Data profiling view of your real-time tables provides out-of-the-box histograms and min-max ranges for each column.
Visual data exploration	Not available	Drag-and-drop features to visually analyze your real-time data.
Copilot experience	Azure Data Explorer cluster can be added as a source in Fabric KQL Queryset to use Copilot capabilities.	Natively available
Built-in ML models	Anomaly detection and forecasting models available. Pro development required to deploy anomaly detection and forecasting models.	Anomaly detection and forecasting models available. Business users can also apply anomaly detection models on incoming streaming data.
Visualization (Microsoft)	Power BI, Azure Data Explorer dashboards	Native one-click integration with Power BI and Real-Time Dashboard
Visualization (Third party)	Grafana, Kibana, Matlab.	Grafana, Kibana, Matlab can also be integrated with Event house.

Act

Capability	Azure PaaS-based solution	Real-time Intelligence solution
Driving business actions from insights	Requires Azure Logic Apps or Power Automate or Azure Functions, Azure Monitor alerts.	Natively available in Fabric using Reflex items in Data Activator with out-of-the-box integration with Power BI Semantic Models, Event stream, and KQL queries.
Reactive system events	Not available	Built-in events published through Real-Time hub; Use reflex items to automate data processes, such as pipelines and notebooks.
Real-time Semantic Models	Not available or code-first solution using Logic Apps or Azure Functions	Not available
Built-in AI	Not available	Not available
Notification destinations	Depends on the connector portfolio of the service.	Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, and Power Automate connectors.

Catalog

Capability	Azure PaaS-based solution	Real-time Intelligence solution
Unified catalog of data streams	Not available	Real-time hub: 1. Data streams created by the users 2. Existing streams from Microsoft sources 3. Fabric system event streams
Discovery of Microsoft data streams	Not available	Real-time Intelligence hub discovers data streams in your Azure tenant.
Capture and act on events from Azure Storage	Requires deploying Azure Event Grid to act on events occurring in Azure Storage.	Can be deployed from Fabric. An Event Grid resource is created in the same resource group as the Azure Storage account.
Capture and act on events from Fabric	Not applicable	Natively available in Fabric

Related content

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