Set up alerting to receive a notification when a certain threshold is reached

Alert definition

An alert is an automatic notification or warning process that can be used in many use cases, like reaching a sales target or going below a specific temperature in your operational process. In more technical terms - an alert is a query that runs periodically. If the result of the query meets the alerting criteria, the notification is sent out.

Note: keep in mind that this feature is only available for Luzmo users (i.e. in the Luzmo application) and dashboards integrated with Embed tokens, as setting Alerts results in user-generated content that should be manageable by the end users themselves. An Embed token will actually create a bootstrapped user in Luzmo which will keep track of all its user-generated content. Dashboards shared via Public URL do not support the Alerting feature and will not show the alert button on widgets. This Academy course guides you through integrating (multi-tenant) dashboards with embed tokens!

Alert creation

An alert is created on chart level and can be done via the (embedded) dashboard editor, embedded dashboards, the user profile page or via the API. The way of working is the same for the first two channels - click the alert icon ( 🔔 ) on the top right corner of the chart.

There are multiple options you can work with:

• Alert name - how the alert will be identified

• Alert frequency - the frequency at which query is run, e.g. every hour

• Trigger - the conditions that will trigger an alert

• Category - subdivisions applied to the data before the trigger criteria is evaluated. Categories allow you to set independent triggers for each entry in a category, e.g. Expenditure per customer or number of passengers per city and airline. If the chart uses several groups or categories, multiple subdivisions may be specified.

• Filter - additional filters for the alert query, e.g. additional filters to set an alert specific to Belgium only. This can be done for any column in your dataset.

• Notification content - a note or message included in the alert notification

• Notification receivers - a list of who should receive the notification

Once you create the alert, the query starts to run periodically and sends a notification when needed.

Persistence of parameters

By default alerts will always use the latest authorization scope of a user. The query, to check whether the alert threshold has been reached and sent the results if needed, will use the parameter overrides, metadata, access rights, ... of the most recent authentication of the user. It is therefore important to ensure each Embed token for a specific user (uniquely identified by the username property) always provides the necessary access to that user's resources and data! This mechanism ensures that previously configured alerts will automatically reflect that user's most recent authentication scope, without having to individually modify each previously configured alert.

If you wish for a user's alert to instead use the authorization scope as set when they configure the alert, you must ensure that at the time the alert is set up each of the parameter overrides that should remain constant is specified as "sticky": true in the authorization token. In below example, when a user sets up an alert while having following parameter setup in their authorization, the alert condition will be evaluated each time with:

• values ["ACME","Umbrella"] for parameter Customers and value "Grand Canyon" for parameter Site, as defined in the token at the time the alert is set up
• while for the parameter Food the value from the last authorization token for that user will be used:

    parameter_overrides: { 
      "Customers": { 
        "value": ["ACME","Umbrella"], "sticky": true 
      },
      "Site":{
        "value": "Grand Canyon", "sticky": true
      }
      "Food": ["Birdseed"] 
    },

Alert creation via API

You can also create an alert via API. Here underneath ‘Core API’ - ‘resources’ in our developer documentation, you can find the needed code snippet.

Edit or delete alert

You can easily edit or delete an alert via the ‘manage alerts’ button.

Alert overview profile page

In your profile, you can find an overview of the alert underneath the ‘My alerts’ tab at the left side. Here, you can also create, edit or delete one.

Disabling Alerting

If desired, you can also disable the option to create alerts in your dashboards. In the dashboard settings underneath the ‘advanced’ section you can toggle off the option ‘Enable setting alerts’. When disabled, end users will no longer have be able to set alerts on any dashboard item.

Alternatively you can also toggle this feature per end-user by specifying the feature override !flag_alerting in the authorization request: more information about feature overrides can be found in this Academy article!