Microsoft Fabric RTI – Creating a Custom Endpoint in Eventstream
Over the past few weeks, I have been creating a mobile app that allows me to scan consumable articles’ barcodes an searches for product information. And, I have been playing around with Microsoft Fabric for a while, but until now, I never played around with RTI (RTI = RealTime Intelligence).
Recipe Overview
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Introduction
As a next feature for my mobile app, I had the idea to share the scanned barcodes with Microsoft Fabric. With that in mind, I got the idea to fiddle around with RTI in Microsoft Fabric. In this data recipe, I’ll be guiding you through the setup of a custom endpoint in Eventstreams.
Enabling the settings
Before we can create a custom endpoint, we need to enable a couple of settings. To enable the settings that we will be discussing shortly, you need the Fabric Administrator role assignment. Without this role, you will not be able to get into the Fabric Admin portal.
To access the Fabric Admin portal, navigate to “Settings” in the Fabric portal and choose “Admin portal” under the “Governance and administration” section. Once in the Admin portal, you can either use the search functionality or search manually for the “Service principals can call Fabric public APIs” setting.
This setting needs to be enabled. To continue, search for the “Allow service principals to create and use profiles” setting. This setting needs to be enabled as well.
Once both settings are enabled, we can start to create our eventstream and custom endpoint.
What you need to connect
To create an eventstream through the Fabric portal, you need to navigate to your desired workspace, which in my case is my Bite Size Data workspace, choose New item and search for Eventstream.
Once chosen, provide a name for your Eventstream and finalize the creation. Once the initialization of your Eventstream has completed, you will get a screen similar to what is shown below. There, you can directly choose “Use custom endpoint”.
After choosing “Use custom endpoint”, we need to provide a source name. This can be anything you want, just make sure you provide a meaningful name. In my case, I’m choosing to name my source “BiteSizeDataApp-Source”.
As you can see in the screenshot above, you can also enable “Schema association”. This setting allows you to specify which schema you would like to allow and process. Be aware that at the time of writing this data recipe, this feature is in preview. Therefor I’m not enabling schema association for now.
Once you add the custom endpoint as a source, you will get a flow as shown in the next screenshot.
Before we can access the Data Source menu, as shown in the screenshot below, we need to publish our Eventstream flow. This can be done by clicking the publish button on the top right. After clicking the publish button, your Eventstream topology is published, and the Data menu will appear on the left hand side of the screen.
If we choose the created Data source in the menu, we can now find all the required details to authenticate against the custom endpoint. As you can see in the screenshot below, there are a couple of protocols available for use: Event Hub, AMQP, and Kafka.
Since I decided to use the Event Hub protocol, I’m checking the SAS Key Authentication method.
Lessons learned
Setting up an Eventstream and a custom endpoint is a fairly straightforward process. Don’t forget to publish your topology. You cannot access the connection details without publishing your Eventstream topology. I learned this the hard way.
Bon Appétit!
