Pulse is a centralized location where you can stay on top of your most important KPIs across multiple dashboards or manage your data alerts.

For example, you can consolidate and monitor important aspects of your business by adding important values from widgets from various dashboards to the Pulse page.

Then, you can create alerts to notify you when certain thresholds are met or anomalies in your data are detected. Pulse provides you with access to your most important data and notifies you when to take action.

Creating Data Alerts

This topic describes data alerts and how you can add them to Pulse.

Data alerts are triggered by conditions you define for your widgets. For example, if you have an Indicator widget that represents your company’s revenue, you can define an alert that notifies you when this revenue reaches or falls below a certain threshold.

Skedulo Analytics supports alerts for the following widgets:

• Indicator Widgets
• Area Chart Widgets
• Bar Chart Widgets
• Column Chart
• Line Chart

For each type of widget you can add to Pulse, you can monitor a single value. For example, for Column charts you can monitor a single section (value) of a column. To monitor multiple values, you can add each value you want to monitor to Pulse separately.

When creating data alerts, you define the condition that triggers the alert. Skedulo Analytics provides three alert conditions that can trigger an alert:

 Threshold

Skedulo Analytics notifies you when a threshold is reached following a build. This condition is useful for monitoring metrics that follow a regular, cyclical schedule.

Automatic

Skedulo Analytics automatically notifies you when the alert engine identifies an anomaly in your data based on machine learning algorithms. The algorithm actively learns from your data and eliminates noise to identify anomalies in your data. Anomaly detection is based on a smoothing algorithm that takes the latest values into account. The more times an ElastiCube is built, the more accurate Skedulo Analytics becomes at identifying any anomalies and notifying you.

 Always

Skedulo Analytics notifies you after each build, regardless if there is a change in your data or not.

In addition, you can configure advanced settings that determine who receives the alert and what channel the alert is sent through. For more information see Advanced Settings.

 

To create a data alert:

1. From the widget’s menu, select Add To Pulse.
2. The Add to Pulse window is displayed.
   
3. In the Name field, enter a meaningful name that represents your alert.
4. In the Alert Condition area, select the condition that triggers the alerts.
5. Click Add to create the alert. The alert is added to Pulse.
   For additional advanced configuration options, see Advanced Settings.

Advanced Settings

By default, when an alert is triggered, you are notified via your email address registered with Skedulo Analytics.

You can also send alerts using more advanced configurations that can notify you across multiple channels, and allows you to customize the message displayed in the notification.

The following topics describe the functionality available in the Advanced Settings options:

Setting Notification Channels

By default, your users are notified via their email addresses registered with Skedulo Analytics. In addition, Skedulo Analytics supports a variety of workflows by sending notifications across multiple applications and services. For example, your users can receive notifications through the Skedulo Analytics mobile application, Zapier, Slack, and other 3rd services via webhooks.

 

To define how users are notified:

1. For Data Alerts, select Advanced Options > .
   
2. In the Notifications area, select the relevant channel for your notification. The default channel, Email, is already selected.
   You can select one or more of the following channels:

• Email
• Mobile
• Slack
• Zapier
• Webhook

3. Click Save.

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Slack

Slack is a real-time team collaboration messaging platform that allows you to receive incoming Webhooks from external sources such as Skedulo Analytics. To send notifications through Slack, you need to enter the URL and optionally, your Slack channel or username, where the notification is to be displayed.

You can ask your Administrator to provide you with the Slack URL and channel.

Zapier

Zapier is an online service that lets you create automated actions connecting disparate business apps and services such as Skedulo Analytics. To receive notifications through Zapier, you must create a Zap and provide Sisense with the relevant URL when configuring your alerts’ notifications.

When an alert is triggered, Skedulo Analytics sends the notification to the Webhook you define in Zapier.

You can ask your Administrator to provide you with the Zapier URL.

Webhooks

Webhooks are a system of automated notifications that indicate that an event occurred, in this case an alert being triggered. To send notifications through additional 3rd party channels, you can select Webhook and enter the Webhook name and URL.

Your Webhook server listens for incoming messages from Skedulo Analytics across the URL specified in the URL field.

You can ask your system administrator to provide you with the Webhook URL.

Customizing Notification Messages

By default, the following message is provided in your email alert notifications:

Hi,

The latest value in the KPI that you are monitoring is:

Value

You can provide customized messages for your notifications when configuring your alert through the alert’s Advanced Settings.

The message you provide replaces the string: The latest value in the KPI that you are monitoring is:

 

For example, if your message is “The last value of my KPI is:”, the message in your alert’s notification will be:

Hi,

The last value of my KPI is:
Value

 

To customize your notification’s text:

1. For Data Alerts, select Advanced  > .
   
2. In the Message area, enter your custom text.
3. Click Save. The next time a notification is sent, your custom message is displayed in the notification.

Configuring Additional Options

You can configure how often and when a notification is sent after an event is triggered. For example, you can limit the amount of notification sent to one when a data alert is triggered. This is useful when you do not need multiple notifications.

 

To configure additional options:

1. When adding or editing a widget to Pulse, in the Advanced Options window, select >Additional Options.
2. Select any of the following options:

• Select Notify only once after a condition is met to limit how many notifications are sent after an event occurs.

3. Click Add to save the alert.