Fabric Maps – Build a Live Geographic Dashboard Without Power BI Hacks

Yooo, what's up? Okay, let me ask you something. Have you ever looked at a table inside a power BI or streaming dataset inside of Fabric and you just thought, ah, I just wish I could see this on a map? Well, this is exactly that. This is Fabric maps. With maps, you can monitor live events and understand what's happening geographically by combining the static data from a lakehouse and also some live data from an event house. It's gonna refresh automatically, and you can just see everything right there. There's no custom visuals, no external tools, and no hacks. So let me show you how I set this up. Enough of all this talking, you know what you like to do here at Guy in a Cube. Let's do what? Let's just head over to my laptop. So now I'm inside of my workspace and I've already created a map here. The way you do this is just by clicking new item. And then you're gonna see there's this new kid in town and that is the map. So you just choose that one. You give it a good name, I'm gonna call it live shipments. And here you see the setup. So what we can do now is that we can add some static data from our lakehouse. So I am gonna choose some data from the shipment lakehouse that I already have set up here. Here you see I have some geospatial data. So I have routes and facilities. Now what I can do is that I can just click the ellipses and decide to show on map. And here you see that we have some facilities inside of the Seattle area and I am also gonna add the routes. Show on Map. Like that. Ta-da. Now, that was static data, but now we also have some real time data here with the event house data. Now to make that happen, let's go back to my workspace. So the first thing I did was to create a lakehouse called shipment. And here you see that I already have some data that's being ingested, but if I open up the KQL database shipment, you see that I have a table here called eh_shipmentLeg_LIVE. So this is the data that I have coming in showing, you know, these shipments that are in transit and also with some sort of status if they're delayed or delivered or picked up and so on. Now, this data specifically is simulated, and I generated that data using a notebook that you see here. Now, if I run this notebook, it's gonna generate this sample data for us, and having these events sent to our Kusto table. Now I created the event house and I also created some sample data that's coming into my table. Now, what I need to create for this to be visible inside of the map, I have to create a query set. So let's do that together inside of my query set here. This is the query I'm running. I am taking the 10 newest ingested data and making sure that I am pulling in latitude and longitude from that sample data. If I run this, you're gonna see that we have these events coming in. Okay, that's cool. And now if we go back to our maps, I can then go to Event House. I can add data items. I'm gonna choose the shipment KQL database, and then I'm gonna find that query set that we just created. So inside here we have the shipment query set, and this is the one that I want to use shipment like GPS live. And then I just hit show on map. That looks correct, hit next. And now we need to map the latitude and longitude columns. So that's why it was important for us to bring that in. So I'm gonna choose latitude here. Longitude there, and I want this to refresh every five seconds and hit next. And then we are gonna add that to the map. Boom. Like that. Now we have everything inside of the map, but I mean, it doesn't look that cool. So we need to do some adjustments visually here. I think. So. First of all, if I drag and drop this, I can choose the placement of the layers. So I want the live data to be on top. And then also we can do some visual changes here. For facilities. I mean, let's make this a bit more Gal in a Cube colors. We could even choose to use a heat map like that, but I want to do bubbles. Let's make the stroke width a bit lower, and as you can see, there's more cool things you could do. I could also have decided the size by data specifically. Now I don't really have anything that would make sense for the facilities. And I could also, if I wanted to enable clustering like this to have it a bit cleaner, if that made sense. Let's make it also a tiny bit see-through like that. And then let's go to routes. Let's also do some line settings here. I want the strokes to be a little bit thinner, and also let's do it a bit see-through and let's make it more Gal in a Cube. Wow. Amazing. Okay. But now we need the live data to be a bit more striking. So let's change this one up a bit as well. Let's make the stroke width here a bit stronger. And this is also cool. You can then decide the color based on one of the data points. I'm gonna choose colors based on status, so for us, that will mean depending on the different colors, this data would then have maybe a delay at this point, something delayed over here. And then it was back in transit and so on.

So there's a bunch of different stuff visually that you can play around with to make this awesome and beautiful. Now, inside of map settings, you can also decide that what type of style you want. Maybe you want a satellite view or night view, but I like the gray scale, so I'm gonna keep it like that. And there's also some other settings that you can play around with here. Amazing. Let's save this map. And now if I want to share this with anyone, because I've made this beautiful map. Of course, I want everyone to see this. Then you can share it directly with someone in your organization. I'm gonna share this with Patrick, and I mean he can edit and also reshare. I think that's fine. Or you can also add maps to your organizational apps. We already did the video on that. You can go check that out if you're interested. A few things to keep in mind. If you want to take advantage of Fabric maps, your admin need to enable that inside of the admin portal. And also the Fabric map feature is still in preview. But now you can combine your static data from the Lakehouse and your realtime data from event streams, and that's not just cool. It's like operational intelligence. If you're working with anything, operational data or realtime data, you should probably be testing this right now. If you want to see more realtime videos, hit that subscribe button. And as always, from Adam, Patrick, and this girl right here. I will see you guys in the next video.