Real-Time dashboards are a great feature in Real Time Intelligence experience to monitor our data. However, by default it’s made to work only with Kusto Databases. The options to create a real time dashboard or to define its data source only accept Kusto Databases.

What if we would like to see in real time the information we have in a lakehouse as well? Let’s discover a solution for this.

The Magic Solution: Shortcuts

We can create shortcuts in a Kusto database pointing to lakehouse tables. This will allow us to query lakehouse tables using KQL from the Kusto databases.

There are some limitations in relation to what we can do with shortcuts in a Kusto Database, but this doesn’t prevent us to build real time dashboards using the shortcuts.

In fact, if needed, we can build a Kusto database only for this purpose: Create shortcuts to lakehouse to allow including the queries into a real-time dashboard. This is useful in scenarios where we may not be using real-time ingestion to Kusto databases, but we still would like the real-time dashboard to show information as soon its ingested in the lakehouse.

Pin to Real Time Dashboard

After creating the shortcuts, the next steps are as usual for the creation of real-time dashboards. We can execute a KQL query in a query set and use the Pin to Dashboard button.

Remember: it needs to be in a query set, not directly in the Kusto Database. The option “Pin to dashboard” is not available when we use the Kusto Database directly.

We can choose between creating a new dashboard or adding the query to an existing one.

Creating Alerts from the Real Time Dashboards

The last and most powerful step is the creation of alerts with Data Activator. From the Real Time dashboard, we can do this and it’s very interesting how we are extending all these features to lakehouse tables.

References

• Real-Time Intelligence: More than a name change
• Fabric Monday 42: Taking Actions from your data
• Fabric Monday 43: The Multiple Flavours of Data Activator and Real-Time Dashboard
• Fabric Monday 44: Using Parameters in Real Time Dashboards
• Fabric Monday 45: Drill-Through in Real-Time Dashboards
• Fabric Monday 46 : Interaction in Real Time Dashboard

Summary

The possibility to expand real-time features to lakehouses is a powerful workaround