18th December 2018Weekly, monthly or quarterly reports? Getting an alert if a threshold is met on your real time data?
These two concepts don’t seem similar but the way to set them up is exactly the same on icCube! This article will show you how to create both these alerts.
PDF sent through Email
To send a PDF report through email, you first – and obviously 🙂 – need to create the dashboard you’d like to receive with a Printing Layout (check how to here)
The Alert feature is available on the Monitoring tab. Check below an example of how to fill in the form in order to have a weekly report received every Friday at 12:00.
The email received will indeed contain the PDF report attached, and the content of the email is editable, you can for instance type in the link for the live dashboard.
Several triggers are available to determine the frequency of alerts sent:
- Cron
- Continuous
- Fixed Interval
- Daily (once per day)
- Daily (several times per day)
- Once
- On Data Changed
One last point is the ERROR message. If your dashboard contains real time data (see incremental load) and the cube fails to load and giving an error on your report, you can either:
- Check the “Continue on error” box to allow sending the report even though it contains an error,
- Or, not check it and the usual email is not sent. You can set up a mail “(On Error)” informing that a failure has occurred.
Alerting a threshold was met
This feature also allows you to set an alert dependant on an MDX expression, therefore if a special situation happens.
For instance, if you have a call center service in your company and people who have called in have been waiting for more than 10 minutes, or if a truck transporting the goods you sell is 2 hours or more behind schedule, etc.
Note that on the previous example the expression “TRUE” is used, showing that the alert does not depend on an MDX statement. An example of threshold can be:
IFF( ([Sales Amount], dtAsOfToday([time])) < ([Sales Amount], dtAsOfToday([time]).lag(1)) , TRUE , FALSE )
therefore sending the alert if the sales were lower than the previous day.
This alert system allows to take immediate actions on your daily work and can definitely help in business critical situations.
By Nathalie Leroy Tapia Heredia