⏰Creating alerts

Prerequisites¶ To set up alerts you need to

• have the "Contributor" permission

• have at least 1 dataset (load only)

• have at least one User group defined

Overview¶

Toucan is a data visualization software; our ambition is to share relevant information with users.

🎯 With Toucan, you can notify users when a specific metric reaches a threshold or goal. By quickly notifying your users when your performance reaches a threshold, you enable your teams to make the right decisions at the right moment.

• You can notify users by email and/or post messages in MS Teams or Slack.

• Alerts are based on the evolution of a specific value in a dataset.

• Alerts are triggered when datasets are published or refreshed, manually or automatically, in production.

Hint During the building or testing phases, we recommend deactivating your alerts.

Practice: set an alert¶

Example: I need to watch the revenue of my shops closely. If the daily revenue goes below 20k€, my audience needs to know that shortly!

• In the staging toolbar, click on AUTOMATIONS and select the ALERTS tab.

• Add a new alert, and give it a name. In our example, “Daily Revenue.”

• Define what data will be monitored and what rule will trigger the alert.

  • Depending on what rules my revenue data lives in the dataset “daily_revenue,” select it in the menu "Threshold rule."

  • The column of my dataset containing the daily revenue is called Revenue. Select it in the dropdown menu "Column."

Define what would be the main condition to trigger an alert

• I need to trigger the alert anytime the daily revenue is less than or equal to 20k€.

  • Select the correct "operator" from the dropdown and enter the target value.

• Define the media and the audience

  • Default media is the Email to user groups. You can select one or multiple user groups per Alert. ex. "France Sales team".

  • You can also or only push alerts to MS Teams or Slack channels.

• Save your modifications

Congrats! You have set an automated alert!

Add story screenshots to the alerts (optional)

It is even more pleasant for your audience to have the visualization of the evolution of the data when they receive an alert. You can attach the visualization of a story linked to this dataset in the alert the user will receive: activate the toggle near Story attachment and select the related story.

Add a screenshot of a story in the alerts

From a user perspective

• Permissions are applied to the recipient of the alerts. Users receive their alerts only on their data.

• Users will receive emails, MS Teams, and Slack standard messages.

• Users can opt out anytime from each email alert.

Hints

1. We recommend using our Data Prep tool to ease alert configuration and create specific datasets to manage alerts.

2. You need to know in which dataset the monitored data lives. If you hesitate, open the Datahub and Dataset panel in a second tab.

3. The value can be a number (float or int), a text, or a date. Just make sure you’re using the same format as your data source.

4. You want to test it before sending it to your targeted audience, select a test user group with only you or spécificationfic testers, refresh your dataset and publish to prod, and wait for the email.

Advanced cases¶

You want to compare your daily revenue to the same day last year and notify only France users if their revenue is from last year.

If your data lives in multiple datasets, don’t forget to use our prepared dataset option to create the perfect dataset to trigger your alerts. I can use a join or append to collect today’s revenue with the same day last year and calculate the difference.

You can also use the conditional steps to filter rows to check shops in the France zone only.

Ensure to select the correct specific user groups for the France zone.