Data Activator supports email and Teams alerts. These are good options when we would like to monitor some information and receive alerts about it.

However, these options have some limitations:

• Teams: It can only connect to the same tenant and doesn’t support sending messages to channels.
• Email: It can only send messages to emails in the same domain as Fabric.

How to solve this problem, being more flexible to send alert messages?

The Solution: Alerts in Pipelines

Pipelines have activities to send email and to send teams messages. These activities don’t have any of these limitations.

Each of these activities allow you to use a login to one of these services: outlook email or teams. You can use any account for the login. It doesn’t need to be either your Fabric account or any account in the same domain as Fabric.

This means you can send teams messages and emails to any domain, no restrictions.

Fabric Item Action

In a Reflex object you can use a Fabric Item Action to trigger a pipeline. You can choose pipelines from any workspace.

The limitation we still have is that we can’t send parameters to the pipeline.

Environments and the Alerts

In a scenario where you have a DEV, TEST and PROD environment, it’s important to identify the messages according to the environment.

It would be great if we could parameterize this information and use a pipeline parameter to dynamically build the message subject.

This could make it possible to configure a deployment pipeline rule to dynamically change the parameter value when we promote the pipeline across the environments.

Unfortunately, pipeline parameters are not recognized by the deployment pipeline for the creation of rules. It’s also not possible to send pipeline parameters from the Reflex action.

Summary

It’s great that we can work around the problem and send notification messages as we would like. However, this is a limited solution considering the problems it creates for the development lifecycle.

We hope the development lifecycle will evolve soon and provide a solution to these problems.