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Rules in ontology (preview) (with Fabric Activator)

The rules feature of ontology (preview) lets you automate and manage event-driven alerts directly within your entity types. With the integrated capabilities of Fabric Activator, you can achieve real-time monitoring and response for your business entities. This feature allows you to define alerts that monitor properties across every instance of an entity type, to ensure comprehensive, ongoing oversight.

Important

This feature is in preview.

Rules transform ontologies from static information models to operationalized ones. The ontology becomes capable of automatically initiating business processes through alerts and automated actions, all within a seamless and context-aware environment. This feature helps you unlock automation capabilities without needing to switch between tools or write custom code, to streamline workflows and enhance efficiency.

Note

Rules in ontology (preview) rely on Fabric Activator and are subject to Fabric Activator costs. For more information about Fabric Activator pricing, see Understand Activator capacity consumption, usage reporting, and billing.

Prerequisites

Before defining rules, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

  • A Fabric workspace with a Microsoft Fabric-enabled capacity.
  • Ontology item (preview) enabled on your tenant.
  • An ontology (preview) item with data binding completed for at least one time series property.

Key concepts

Rules use the following ontology (preview) concepts. For definitions of these terms, see the Ontology (preview) glossary.

Create a rule

  1. Open the rules configuration from the ontology overview, or from the preview experience.

    To open rules from the ontology overview, select ... next to an entity type name to open its options menu. Hover over Add and view rule, then select View rules.

    Screenshot of View rules from the ontology page.

    To open rules from the preview experience, select Add and view rules > View rules from the menu ribbon.

    Screenshot of View rules from the preview page.

  2. The Rules panel opens, showing all the rules associated with an entity type.

    Screenshot of Rules panel.

  3. By default, ontology rules are saved to a new Fabric Activator item. If you want to make changes, select Edit from the Rules panel. From there, you can change the name of the new Fabric Activator item or choose an existing Fabric Activator item to use instead.

    Screenshot of selecting the Fabric Activator item.

    Note

    We recommend saving all rules for an ontology to the same workspace and Fabric Activator item.

  4. In the main Rules panel, create a new rule with the Add rule button.

    Screenshot of adding the rule.

  5. Configure the rule, including conditions, actions, and save location. Ontology-authored rules support temporal conditions (for example, thresholds exceeded over a time window) and aggregations via the Fabric Activator condition configuration; these options are available in the rule designer opened from ontology and are evaluated per entity instance. For more information about these fields, see Create a rule in Fabric Activator.

    Screenshot of configuring the rule.

    When you're finished configuring, select Create.

  6. The rule is now visible in the Rules panel. To start or stop the rule, toggle the switch next to the rule name.

    Screenshot of the option to disable a rule.

View and edit a rule

To examine the rule in more detail, open it in Fabric Activator. Select ... next to the rule name to open its options menu, then Open in Activator.

Screenshot of opening the rule in Fabric Activator.

In Fabric Activator, you can make further edits to the rule and analyze its conditions and actions. For more information, see Create a rule in Fabric Activator.