How to :: create alerts

Overview

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

This is why Toucan integrates an alert feature to quickly notify users when a threshold or goal is reached on a dataset 🔔

By quickly notifying your users when your performance reaches a threshold, you enable your teams to make the right decisions at the right moment.

Keep in mind

  • As of today, only app builders can setup alerts. User will be notified by email 📨 or via MS Teams (if configured).
  • Alerts are set on a dataset for now. Meaning you define your threshold rule based on your data.

Note

To ease alert configuration we recommend that you use our Data Prep tool. Create specific datasets for alerts 🙂

  • Alerts will be trigger when you publish to production. Every time you publish to production, Toucan will check if the rule you defined is met and notify users accordingly 🔔

Note

When in building or testing phase, we recommend you deactivate your alerts 😉

  • Permissions are applied to the recipient of the alerts. Users receive their alerts only on their data 🔐
  • Emails and MS Teams messages are not yet customizable 🖊️
  • Users can opt-out anytime from each alert 🔕
  • To avoid spamming, alerts are sent once a day maximum

Set an alert

Let say I need to closely watch the revenue of my shops. My Toucan application is refreshed with the previous day data every morning. If daily revenue is below 20k, I need to know immediately!

🔔 Let’s setup an alert

From the staging toolbar, click on Automation and go to the Alerts tab.

Create a new alert and let’s call it “Daily Revenue”.

My revenue data is located in the dataset “daily_revenue”, so let’s select it from the dropdown menu.

The column of my dataset containing the daily revenue is called Revenue, let’s select it from the dropdown menu.

Note

You need to have your dataset in mind 😉 if you’re hesitating, open your data explorer in a second tab.

I need to trigger the alert anytime the daily revenue is less than or equal to 200.

Let’s select the correct operator from the dropdown and enter the value.

Note

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

alerts rule

In Story attachment, you can add a screenshot of a story using this dataset in your alert message.

One last step! Let choose who and how to notify.

You can choose an email notification for your alert and select specific user groups as recipients.

Note

Don’t hesitate to preview the email 🔥

You can also choose to send this alerts in a MS Teams channel to broaden the audience.

alerts recipient

🔔 Your alert is now set! Just wait for the next publish for your users to receive an email or the MS Teams notification.

Note

Not comfortable on the result? Create an alert and send it to a user group that contains only one user : you 🙂 Release to prod and wait for the email 😉

alerts mail

Go further

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

If your data is located 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 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.

Make sure to select the correct specific user groups for the France zone.