Alert is a great feature that allows you to be always on top of certain critical KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) for your organization. With the advent of smart phones and tablets, the alert feature is even more relevant and desirable, because it notifies you and thus allows you to take immediate action to deal with critical situations.
In a nut shell, alert is a way for the user to receive notification when certain pre-defined event happens. We get alerts in our daily life. For example, you will get a phone call from the alarm company, if your home’s alarm system detects an attempted unauthorized entry. Your favorite supermarket sends you an email when certain items go on sale. In EspressReport ES, the pre-defined event will be the value of a KPI exceeding or falling below certain desired threshold For example, an alert will “trigger” when sales goal is below plan, inventory of a product falls below a day’s average sales, defect rate of a product exceeds 2% etc..
ERES supports two types of KPI alerts : dashboard or watched alerts, and monitoring alerts.
You can configure alerts for charts, reports, or maps and then you can monitor or watch the alerts.
To set up dashboard alert, you must have the alert-configured template (report, chart or map) included in the dashboard. You then choose the alert that you want to watch. To watch the alert(s), the user simply run the published dashboard. If at least one of the watched alerts is triggered, the report, chart, or map will start flashing and the values that triggered the alert will be highlighted in the case of a report.
You can also set up alert monitoring. Essentially, it is a background job that checks the value of the KPI periodically. When a monitored alert is triggered, the report/chart will be exported and saved to disk, uploaded to an FTP, or sent by email to pre-defined email recipients. Also, every time an alert is evaluated, a new log record is added to Alert Monitoring Log. Log record is created even when no alerts were triggered during the evaluation. As such, you can watch all of your KPIs over long periods of time.