Smart alerts
Smart alerts help you stay on top of important changes in your data without constantly checking your reports.
You can create an alert for any metric in your dataset and define the threshold that matters to you. When the alert condition is met, you’ll automatically receive an email notification.
Alerts are evaluated on the schedule you configure, so you stay informed at the right moments without having to monitor your data manually.
How to setup
Once you have created a report configuration and saved it once, open it again and now you’ll see the ‘Smart alerts’ tab at the top.
Click on the ‘Add smart alert’ button to get started.
Configuration options
There are quite a few configuration options that you can set. Let’s go through them:
Basic information
Alert name / Description: these are visible for anyone that has access to the report and is allowed to subscribe to this alert.
Enable this alert: only enabled alerts are visible for users/evaluated according to the configured schema
Dax expression
This is where you configure an expression that you want to check against. It can be anything that returns a single value.
Press the Test button to directly test the DAX expression against your underlying model and show the value.
Threshold configuration
In this section you configure when you want this alert to ‘trigger’. The following operators are available:
You read this configuration as “The evaluated value from the DAX expression must be {OPERATOR} the threshold value”. If the result is ‘true’ it will trigger and send out an email.
Email settings
By default when DataTako sends out the email, it will use a standard email subject and title. You can override this for alerts, and you can also override the default email contents from the settings menu, which we’ll discuss a bit later in this setup guide.
You can also include additional information in your email. Perhaps you want to explain what someone can do to fix the ‘problem’ that caused the alert to trigger.
Press the send test email button to send a test email for this alert to yourself.
Schedule
You can freely configure when DataTako needs to evaluate the DAX expression for this alert. You can choose between:
- Hourly
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
Please note: you can add multiple schedules to a single alert.
Access and auto-subscription
Access control
Choose between allowing everyone with access to this report to subscribe to this alert OR select specific users you want to allow to use this alert.
Auto-subscription
Don’t want users to have to manually subscribe to this alert? Enable the ‘Automatically subscribe all users with access’ to automatically enable this alert for everyone with access to this report. If you don’t use this option, you are able to select specific users you do want to automatically subscribe.
Please note: if you automatically subscribe a user, they can manually unsubscribe if they wish.
How do report viewers use alerts?
If someone has access to one ore multiple alerts, they will see a ‘bell’ button in the report:
Clicking on it opens the following window:
A report consumer can subscribe by clicking on the ‘toggle’ button of the alert to subscribe, and click again to unsubscribe.
Overriding the default alert email
Want to change the default alert? You can do so from the settings menu:
https://app.datatako.com/settings/?subtab=email&emailTab=emaillayouts
Expand the Smart alert email.
You can configure the title, subject, emailbody, footer text and the button text. You have a couple of variables availabe, which can be used in any of the inputs. Just copy and paste the variables in the fields.
