Alerts · 2023.03

You can set up alerts for Pivot to monitor events in your data. An alert monitors for when one or more measures match configurable conditions. You can choose how you want to be notified when an alert gets triggered, and set the recipients for these notifications.

Pivot uses the alert configuration to query the specified data cube and filter the data. It then evaluates your specified conditions against the query results to determine when to trigger the alert.

Alerts are based on your own data—for example, you can trigger an alert when revenue drops by a specified percentage.

Create an alert

Follow these steps to create an alert:

Click the menu ellipsis on the Data cube page, then click Set up alert:
The Create new alert page appears. If you click Set up alert icon from the data cube view, Pivot populates some of the alert's configurable fields with values from the data cube. You can modify all fields before saving the alert:

Field	Description
Alert name	Enter a name for your new alert. This name is also the alert's title in the alerts view. The name also appears in emails and webhook notifications.
Severity	The severity you select affects the alert's color and icon in the UI. Supported values are Info, Warning, Error, OK.
Data cube	Specify the data cube that has the data you want the alert to monitor.
Check every	This controls how often you want the alert to run.
Time frame	The time frame controls how much data the alert can monitor every time it runs. Setting this field to one day, for instance, results in the alert querying data for the previous day (defined from the moment the alert is evaluated). A best practice is to make Time frame equal to or greater than Check every. By default, Time frame and Check every are equal.
Filters	You can define one or more filters to delimit the alert data gathered during the alert evaluation. You cannot define a static time filter.
Look at	Select Overall values to evaluate against a measure, and "Dimension values" to evaluate against a dimension.
Comparison	Select None for the alert to trigger based on an absolute condition, such as when a certain measure is greater than a certain value. For a relative condition, such as when a measure changes by a certain value, select a comparison period or set a custom period.
Conditions	When the conditions you specify here are true, your alert is triggered. You can specify one or more conditions. If you specify more than one, you can select whether one or all conditions must be true to trigger the alert.
Measure	Specify the measure to which your conditions apply.
Condition	If you set the Comparison field to None, you can trigger the alert when the condition is greater than or less than a specified value. If you set a comparison period and enable the Enhanced alert conditions editor feature flag, you can trigger the alert when the condition grows or drops by an absolute value or percentage.

Preview shows how many times the alert would have been triggered on your data cube in the past day. The active alert may trigger more or less often depending on your live data.

Edit an alert

To edit an alert, click the ellipsis icon on the Alerts page, then click Edit.

Alternatively, you can edit an alert by clicking the alert's name. Then click Edit alert.

Configure alert delivery options

Only users—not roles—can receive alert emails. Additionally, depending on your Pivot configuration, the Delivery options view might not be available. If you are running Pivot in default-user mode, and you don't support either email or webhooks, this view is hidden.

To specify the method by which to send your alert and also who should receive it:

Click Delivery options on the Create new alert page:

new alert delivery setup

On the new page that appears, complete the following fields:

Field	Description
Recipients	Choose a list of users or roles you want to have read access to this alert. Read access enables you to see an alert, and possibly receive emails about the alert (if your email is specified in the Email field). Read access doesn't let you modify the alert.
Admins	Choose a list of users or roles you want to have write access to this alert. Write access enables you to see an alert and its feed, and possibly receive emails about the alert (if your email is specified in the Email field). Write access also lets you edit the alert.
Owner	The alert's owner.
Email	Users with a check in the checkbox next to their email address receive an email every time the alert is triggered.
Webhooks	Configure a webhook to be notified about triggered alerts by a third-party service. Pivot alerts have built-in support for both Slack and custom webhooks. See Configure a webhook for more information.

Configure an alert email in on-prem Pivot

You can send an email to an alert's chosen recipients when an alert is triggered. To send an email, you must first configure Pivot to send emails.

You can send both default and custom alert emails.

The default template for an alert email is in the Pivot configuration file.

The default subject line is as follows:
subject: '[{{{severity}}}] {{{title}}} was triggered on {{{triggerDate}}}

The default markup is as follows:

<!doctype html>
  <html>
    <head>
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
      <title>{{title}}</title>
      <style>
        html {
          font-family: sans-serif;
        }

        h2 {
          font-weight: initial;
          color: #1c1c1c;
        }

        dt {
          float: left;
          clear: left;
          width: 100px;
          color: #969696;
        }

        dd {
          margin: 0 0 0 100px;
          padding: 0 0 0.5em 0;
          height: 18px;
        }

        a {
          text-decoration: none;
          color: white;
          background-color: #258bdd;
          padding: 11px 16px 9px 16px;
          font-size: 13px;
        }

        table {
          border-collapse: collapse;
          font-size: 0.8rem;
        }

        td, th {
          border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(232, 232, 232);
          padding: 10px 20px;
        }

        th {
          color: #969696
        }

        td {
          text-align: left;
        }

        tr:nth-child(even) td {
          background-color: rgb(250,250,250);
        }

        tr:nth-child(odd) td {
          background-color: rgb(245,245,245);
        }

      </style>
    </head>
    <body>
      <dl>
        <dt>Data cube</dt>
        <dd>{{dataCubeTitle}}</dd>

        <dt>Time frame</dt>
        <dd>{{timeFrame}}</dd>

        <dt>Filter</dt>
        <dd>{{filter}}</dd>

        <dt>Condition</dt>
        <dd>{{condition}}</dd>
        {{^summaries.1}}
          <dt>Event</dt>
          <dd>{{summaries.0.event}}</dd>
        {{/summaries.1}}
      </dl>

      {{#summaries.1}}
        <table>
          <thead>
            <td scope="col">{{splitTitle}}</td>
            <td scope="col">Event</td>
          </thead>
          <tbody>
            {{#summaries}}
            <tr>
              <td>{{value}}</td>
              <td>{{event}}</td>
            </tr>
            {{/summaries}}
          </tbody>
        </table>
      {{/summaries.1}}


      {{#link}}
      <p>
        <a href="{{link}}">View</a>
      </p>
      {{/link}}
    </body>
  </html>

You can use the following interpolation properties in both the email's subject and body:

Property	Description
`title`	The alert's title.
`link`	A link to a Pivot data cube view for the report instance. This requires the `linkHostName` config setting to be configured.

Configure Imply Hybrid to send alert emails

Before you can send an email alert in Imply Hybrid (formerly Imply Cloud), you must configure Imply Hybrid to send email.

To configure Imply Hybrid to send email using Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES):

Verify your email address. See Verifying email addresses in Amazon SES for more information.
Move out of the Amazon SES sandbox. See Moving out of the Amazon SES sandbox for more information.
Add the ses:SendRawEmail permission to your imply-cloud-instance-poc IAM role for permission to call the Amazon SES API.

Configure a webhook

A user needs the ManageAlertsWebhooks permission to create or modify webhooks for an alert.

For Slack webhooks, the payload is predefined and you only need a webhook URL. For custom webhooks, you can customize the data Pivot sends.

Configure a Slack webhook

You can send alert data to a Slack webhook:

Generate a webhook URL by following steps 1 to 3 of this Slack tutorial.
Paste the URL into a new webhook as shown below:

alert new webhook

Slack's default payload is as follows:

{
  "attachments": [
    {
      "fallback": "<title>",
      "color": "<color>",
      "title": "<title>",
      "title_link": "<link>",
      "text": "<summary>",
      "ts": <triggerDate>
    }
  ]
}

Configure a custom webhook

You can define a webhook as custom and customize its payload. A custom payload contains a variety of keys that are interpolated as follows:

Field	Description
`title`	The Alert name you specified when creating or editing the alert.
`summary`	A brief summary of the conditions that triggered the alert.
`link`	A relative link to the event that triggered the alert, relative to the installation.
`triggerDate`	The timestamp for when the trigger fired, in seconds.
`color`	The color related to the alert's type: blue for info, green for success, red for error, and yellow for warning.
`severity`	The alert's type, as defined in its configuration.
`footer`	The alert's sender, which is either Imply or the user who sent the notification.
`dimensionName`	If your alert checks a measure that is grouped by a dimension, then `dimensionName` is in the payload. `dimensionName` is the dimension by which your data is grouped.
`dimensionValue`	If your alert checks a measure that is grouped by a dimension, `dimensionValue` is the specific value dimension that triggers the alert.