Work with Pulse

Pulse is a page 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.

Data Alerts

You can create data alerts and 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 store’s revenue, you can define an alert that notifies you when this revenue reaches or falls below a certain threshold.

Pulse supports alerts for the following widgets:

  • Indicators
  • Area Charts
  • Bar Charts
  • Column Charts
  • Line Charts

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

When creating data alerts, you define the condition that triggers the alert. There are three alert conditions that can trigger an alert:

  • Threshold: Pulse notifies you when a threshold is reached following a build. This condition is useful for monitoring metrics that follow a regular, cyclical schedule.
  • Automatic: Pulse 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 Pulse becomes at identifying any anomalies and notifying you.
  • Always: Pulse 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, below.

To create a data alert:

  1. From the widget’s menu, select Add To Pulse. The Add to Pulse window displays.
  2. In Name, enter a meaningful name that represents your alert.
  3. In Alert Condition area, select the condition that triggers the alerts: Automatic, Threshold, or Always.
  4. Click Add. The alert is created and added to Pulse.

For additional advanced configuration options, see Advanced Settings, below.

Advanced Settings for Data Alerts

By default, when an alert is triggered, you are notified via email .

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
  • • Customizing Notification Messages
  • • Configuring Additional Options

Set Notification Channels

By default, users are notified via email. In addition, notification can be sent across multiple applications and services. For example, your users can receive notifications through Zapier, Slack, and other 3rd services via webhooks.

To define how users are notified:

  1. While creating a data alert, in the Add to Pulse window, 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.

Slack

Slack is a real-time team collaboration messaging platform that allows you to receive incoming Webhooks from external sources. 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 including Radial, Inc. To receive notifications through Zapier, you must create a Zap and provide the relevant URL when configuring your alerts’ notifications.

When an alert is triggered, Pulse 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 across the URL specified in the URL field.

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

Customize 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. While creating a data alert, in the Add to Pulse window, select Advanced Options.
  2. In Message, enter your custom text.
  3. Click Save. The next time a notification is sent, your custom message is displayed in the notification.

Configure 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 if you build your ElastiCubes frequently, but do not need multiple notifications.

To configure additional options:

  1. While creating a data alert, in the Add to Pulse window, select Advanced Options.
  2. Select Additional Options.
  3. Select any of the available options, for example, select Notify only once after a condition is met to limit how many notifications are sent after an event occurs.
  4. Click Add to save the alert