Where is the difference between "Real-Time-Intelligence" in Fabric and "Azure Stream Analytics"?

Question

HI,

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/get-started/microsoft-fabric-overview has as components (a.o.) Real-Time Intelligence and some Synapse-Services.

But in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/real-time-intelligence/overview Stream Analytics is not even mentioned. I do not understand the differences, or why no mention.

Neither do I understand why other synapse-services are a part, but Synapse Analytics is not even mentioned: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/synapse-analytics/overview-what-is

Why? What do I not understand/ what knowledge do I not possess/ what mental leap did I not take?

Answer 1

Hello @Michael Schmidt,

welcome to this moderated Azure community forum.

Microsoft offers various Azure PaaS resources to be able to work with real-time data, data in flow.

Think about the IoT Hub (ingest), Event Hub (ingest, fan in, fan out), Stream Analytics (making decisions and routing messages based on real-time ingested data and reference data), Azure Data Explorer (storage and querying of timeseries data, immutable facts and events like logging or security audits or IoT telemetry).

This is great if you want full control and you have deep knowledge about these Azure resources so you can connect them.

For this reason now Microsoft Fabric is offered.

Using a easy browser based SaaS approach, you can start building a cloud solution in minutes.

This is also true for Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence.

This is the name of the Fabric experience where you use Fabric components to ingest and transform and route messages (the Eventstream component) and send them to a KQL database for storage (Eventhouse). You can then share KQL queries to query the data (KQL Queryset) or even base real-time dashboards (eh.. Real-Time dashboards).

On top of that, you can add alerting rules based on the 'Data Activator' (Reflex).

This also integrated with eg. Power BI dashboards and Grafana.

All these Fabric components are based on Azure PaaS recources.

eg. Event House and the KQL databases and the Real-time dashboards are based on Azure Data Explorer.

Azure Stream Analytics (combined with eg. eventhubs) are the base of the Eventstream component.

The biggest change is that at this moment, Stream Analytics has a great sql-query-ish experience where the Eventstream has a full no-code experience.

Try it out for free, there is a 60 days trial period of Fabirc available.

Check out this 15-part series of blog posts about Fabric where you learn all the different parts of the Fabric Real-Time Intelligence experience.

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