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.

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.

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.

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.

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

1. Chose an Alert type

One can choose between two options

• SQL Metric Based Alert — This allows a user to write SQL queries to fetch metrics values like “Avg. Delivery Time”, “Earnings per Order”, “Payment Success Rate”, “ARPU” etc.
• SQL List Based Alert — This option allows users to monitor a list of assets or units like “Active Drivers in area”, “Stocked out Products/SKUs in a Store”, “Hubs with High congestion”, “Banks with server issues” etc.

2. Write SQL query

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

3. Configure Alert Trigger Condition and Incident Creation

Set up how frequently you want to check the metric.

• Alert Trigger condition:Set up how frequently you want to check the metric. The underlying condition to trigger an alert (addition of a new row, change in status, metric crosses a threshold etc)
• Incident Creation — Set up subsequent actions after an alert is triggered like — When to create an Incident? or How these Incidents are resolved?
• Escalation and Automatic closing — Set up an escalation policy
• Escalation Time — The time after which an unresolved Incident will be escalated.
• Escalation Assignee — Incident will be sent to this person(Higher level Ops manager or City Manager).

4. Configure Alert and Incident Details

Add details for the alerts like:

• Alert Name (Ex: High Cancellation Alert, Low Order Accuracy alert)
• Priority (Ex: Low, Medium, High)
• Add to Team — City or Functional team responsible for handling the situation/problem.
• Default Assignee — Team member responsible for resolving the incident.
• Alert message — The message (+ problem details) you want your team members to receive.

5. Setup Notifications

Choose the channel where you want to get your notifications when the alert is triggered. One can choose between multiple destinations like

• Slack
• Email
• WhatsApp etc.

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.

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.

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!

Originally published at https://blog.locale.ai on September 13, 2022.