Setting up Alerts on Your Business Metrics - Made Easy with Locale

Does something break in your Ops every day? Do you see increasing delays in your service regions? Are you encountering a High number of fraudulent transactions (or) cancelled orders?

They don’t, in an ideal world where everything works smoothly like a well-oiled machine but the reality is far from it.

In the real world operations break and more often than not we see multiple issues causing the problem and sending our teams into a frenzy. No Ops team however big it is can monitor all the metrics at once. So they start looking at numerous dashboards and reports to make sense of the problems.

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Dashboards have become a go-to tool for Ops teams across the world. But it is not a silver bullet for all your problems.

While Dashboards can be very useful, it is very difficult to find out exactly when things are breaking. More often than not it is too late by the time we address the most pressing problems! Continuous monitoring of dashboards is also a resource-intensive task. It takes a lot of man hours and risks allowing human error. That is why reactive tools like Dashboards and Reports barely make a dent in issues your company may face.

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What if you can see the problem from a mile away?

Imagine a tool that can continuously monitor your business metrics for any deviations and alert your teams before anything breaks. Such alerts can make your teams proactive and stay on top of the problems.

There are workarounds and hacks to set up alerts on SQL queries using crontab, python scripts or Workflow management tools. But they are complex, unreliable and sometimes fatal if used haphazardly.

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That's why we're building Locale.ai🚀

Locale takes your current dashboards a step further. It's an ultimate control centre for ops teams, empowering you with real-time alerts + actions so you can become ✨proactive✨! It provides you with a quick and easy way to set alerts on top of your metrics. All you need to do is provide the SQL query of the metric you want to monitor and Locale notifies you when it is about to break so you can put out fires before they start. It also enables your managers to track incidents and see how effective their teams are resolving them.

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Here is a step-by-step guide on how one can easily set up alerts on SQL queries in Locale.

Step 1: Write an SQL query to fetch a value or a list, you can setup alerts on the result of your SQL query

Write a new query (or) copy any of your existing SQL queries to calculate metrics critical to your teams in the InBuilt Collaborative SQL editor.

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Step 2: Configure your alert condition on top of your query result

Set up Alert conditions based on the results your query fetches.

• Querying Frequency: Set up how frequently you want to check this metric. You can chose to query your database from list of frequency options ranging from once every 1 min to every Hour or choose to run it once every day (at 06:30 AM UTC).
• Trigger Condition:Choose when to trigger an alert from two options

Trigger Option 1 - new row is added to the list: Pick this option to monitor a list of assets or units like “Active Drivers in an area”, “Stocked out Products/SKUs in a Store”, “Hubs with High congestion”, “Banks with server issues” etc.

Unique column: addition of any record with new value in this column will trigger an alert.

Trigger Option 2 - value in first row: Pick this option if you want to fetch and monitor metrics like “Avg. Delivery Time”, “Earnings per Order”, “Payment Success Rate”, “ARPU” etc.

Column : Pick the column containing the value you want to monitor

Operator : choose an operator (<, >, = etc.)

Threshold : Enter an optimal threshold value, an alert will be triggered when your metrics breaches this threshold.

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Step 3: Configure Incidents created from this alert

• Incident Title : Write a title for incidents. You can also include column values from your query results.
• Incident Type/Priority : Assign a priority to this incident to help segregate incidents based on their criticality.
• Team Assigned: Choose the team responsible for this alert
• Person assigned : Choose a person responsible for resolving this incident.
• Escalation: Set up rules to escalate the incident if it stays unresolved.
• Time : The time after which an unresolved Incident will be escalated.
• Person : Incident will be sent to this person(Higher level Ops manager or City Manager).

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Step 4: Setup Actions and Notifications for the incidents

Configure where and whom the notifications for Incidents would go

• Destination Channel: Choose between different destinations like slack, email etc.
• Address : Enter the slack channel or the email id of the team or person you want to notify.
• Classification : Chose when to notify the selected destination. (All Incident notifications or Escalated Incidents only)

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Incident Management and Collaboration Module

Once an Alert is triggered, a team member can look at the underlying data required to resolve the incident and follow up on it. Here we’ll take look into Incident Management and Collaboration Module.

• The Incidents Screen will show all the times an alert is triggered in chronological order.
• Each Incident will show Alert Details like Priority, Triggered Time, Alert message, time since trigger, Incident status, Comments(count), and assignee.
• Alert Overview Section will provide details of Who and when the alert is created along with alert stats trend line for set timelines(Last 7 days, months etc.)

• Once you click on an alert you will see a collaborative space where the manager can tag and follow up on issues with appropriate teams/people running things on the ground.

• You can also view when the alert was first triggered and how many times such events have occurred since, participants etc. in the Incident Details section on the right.
• One can also change the priority, change the status, add required participants, escalate, and look at the data points on this screen.

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Want to make your ops team proactive?

You can start by using Locale and set up your first alert in a matter of minutes. We’ve made Integration with Locale quick, simple and convenient. We offer connections to many data sources(S3, Redshift, GCS, Big Query, Postgres etc) and multiple destination channels(slack, email etc.) for notifications.

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Start using Locale now and make your Ops teams proactive!

If you are eager to know more, Book a call with one of our specialists to have all your questions answered today!