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CSA Loom — the Microsoft Fabric experience for Azure tenants where Fabric isn't yet available: lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, semantic models, Activator rules, Data Agents, across Commercial, GCC, GCC-High, and DoD IL5

KQL Dashboard / Real-Time Dashboard Editor — Fabric-parity spec

Captured 2026-05-26 by catalog agent from Microsoft Learn (Fabric Real-Time Intelligence docs) + inspection of apps/fiab-console/lib/editors/phase3-editors.tsx KqlDashboardEditor. No live Real-Time Dashboard in casino-fabric-poc, so spec is from Fabric docs + Loom editor source.

Overview

The Fabric Real-Time Dashboard (formerly KQL Dashboard) is the visual analytics surface on top of an Eventhouse/KQL Database. It is a collection of tiles, optionally organized into pages, where each tile is backed by a KQL query and rendered as a chart, stat, table, map, etc. It targets near-real-time observability of streaming data already landed in Kusto and is the typical consumption layer for Eventstream→Eventhouse pipelines.

Fabric UX

Top-level chrome — view vs. edit mode

  • Viewing mode (default): tiles render; parameter filter bar at top; manual refresh; share + export.
  • Editing mode toggle (top-right): unlocks the ribbon, add-visual buttons, page management, parameters pane, base queries, data source registration.

Ribbon — Home tab (edit mode)

  • New visual (add tile) · Add markdown (text/headers box) · Add alert (Activator hand-off) · Add data source · Add parameter
  • Save · Refresh (manual) · Auto-refresh policy
  • Editing/Viewing mode toggle · Share · Export to PDF

Ribbon — Manage tab

  • Parameters manager
  • Base queries (named query fragments reusable across tiles)
  • Refresh settings (interval, minimum, default)
  • Data sources (registered KQL databases, Azure Data Explorer clusters)

Panes

  • Pages pane (left): list of pages with Add page, rename, reorder; supports drillthrough targets
  • Parameters pane (top filter bar): live filter chips for every active parameter
  • Tile editor pane (right, when editing tile): three sub-panes — Explorer (schema), Run query (KQL editor), Copilot (NL2KQL preview)
  • Visual formatting pane (right): Visual type · Data binding · Display options · Legend · X/Y axis · Colors · Conditional formatting · Interactions

Tile types

Backed by the KQL render operator plus dashboard-specific visuals:

KQL render visuals: anomaly chart · area chart · bar chart · column chart · line chart · pie chart · scatter chart · time chart · table · card

Dashboard-specific visuals (only in Real-Time Dashboards / ADX dashboards): - Stat — single big number (with optional sparkline / delta) - Multi Stat — grid of stats (1×1 up to 5×5 slot configuration) - Map — geo-point visualization with Latitude/Longitude, Geo point, or Infer location modes; size column; label column - Funnel chart — sequential stage drop-off - Heatmap — 2-D numeric matrix with color palette - Markdown box — static text/header/links (not query-backed)

Parameters pane

Five parameter types: 1. Single-selection / multi-selection (drop-down from a query) 2. Free text (string input) 3. Time range (with default _startTime / _endTime variables) 4. Data source (switch between registered Kusto databases at runtime) 5. Drillthrough (column-to-parameter binding from a source tile)

Each parameter has: label, variable name (used in KQL as _var), data type, default value, "Show on pages" scope.

Drillthrough config

On any tile in edit mode → Interactions → toggle Drillthrough on: - Destination page (one or more target pages within the same dashboard) - Column → Parameter pairs (same data type required) - Selecting a value in the source visual opens the destination page with the parameter pre-filled

Refresh policy

Per-dashboard auto-refresh (managed in Manage tab): - Minimum refresh interval (lower bound viewers can pick) - Default refresh interval (5s · 10s · 30s · 1m · 5m · 15m · 30m · 1h · 2h · 12h · 24h · never) - Auto-refresh can be enforced by editors or left viewer-controlled

Base query editor

Reusable named KQL fragments. Pattern: 

// base query "recentEvents"
RawData | where Timestamp > ago(_lookback)
Tiles then union recentEvents or recentEvents | summarize .... Single definition, many consumers — reduces duplication and improves cache reuse.

Sharing & export

  • Share dashboard with users/groups (Fabric workspace RBAC)
  • Export to PDF (full dashboard or current page)
  • Pin tile to Power BI (creates Power BI report from tile query)
  • Save to dashboard from a KQL Queryset — push a query result directly as a tile

What Loom has today

From apps/fiab-console/lib/editors/phase3-editors.tsx::KqlDashboardEditor and app/api/items/kql-dashboard/[id]/route.ts: - Tile array persisted in Cosmos (tiles: [{ title, kql, viz, database? }]) - Three viz types: table · line · bar - Add tile · Delete tile · inline editor (title + viz select + KQL textarea) - Re-run all button executes every tile's KQL via executeQuery and stores results inline - Edit JSON raw editor for bulk tile authoring - Per-tile result preview (5 rows of raw KQL output as |-joined text) - Ribbon stub only — no functional sub-tabs - Save persists to Cosmos; no Fabric workspace push

Gaps for parity

  1. Visual breadth — Loom has table/line/bar only; missing stat, multi-stat, map, pie, area, column, scatter, funnel, heatmap, anomaly, time chart
  2. Visual formatting pane — no per-tile config for legend, axis labels/scale, color series, conditional formatting, slot layout
  3. Pages — single flat canvas; no page tabs, no drillthrough targets
  4. Parameters — no parameter bar, no _var substitution at execution time, no time-range/free-text/data-source parameter types
  5. Drillthrough — entirely missing
  6. Auto-refresh policy — no per-dashboard refresh interval; only manual Re-run all
  7. Base queries — no reusable KQL fragments
  8. Markdown tiles — no static text/heading support
  9. Data source registration — single hard-coded database field; no multi-cluster/multi-DB picker UI
  10. Copilot NL2KQL — Loom has cross-item Copilot but not the in-tile authoring pane
  11. Add alert — no hand-off to Loom Activator from a tile
  12. Export to PDF — not implemented
  13. Editing vs. Viewing mode — no mode toggle; the surface is always editable

Backend mapping

All KQL execution uses the ADX/Kusto cluster already provisioned for Loom Eventhouse: - Tile KQL → executeQuery(database, kql) via the existing Kusto data-plane client (proven in UAT) - Parameters → inject let _var = …; declarations before the tile KQL at execution time - Base queries → store as named entries in the dashboard's Cosmos doc; prefix concatenated at execution - Auto-refresh → client-side setInterval driven by per-dashboard policy persisted in Cosmos - Drillthrough → URL-state encoding (query string) so destination page reads parameter values from the URL - Export to PDF → server-side render via headless Chromium (puppeteer or Playwright) of the viewing-mode URL - Add-alert → POST to existing /api/items/activator/{id}/rules with the tile's KQL embedded as the rule's monitor query

Required Azure resources

All present in current FiaB deployment: - ADX/Kusto cluster (Eventhouse equivalent) — already deployed - Cosmos DB (for dashboard config) — already deployed - App Service / Container App running the Console — already deployed

No new resources required. Optional: a Playwright-capable container for PDF export.

Estimated effort

3 sessions. Visual breadth + formatting pane is ~1 session. Pages + parameters + drillthrough is ~1 session (interlocking features). Auto-refresh + base queries + alert hand-off + PDF export is the third session. Copilot NL2KQL inside the tile is a stretch goal worth a fourth session if the cross-item Copilot can be embedded cleanly.