Notifications for Metrics - Overview

Stoplight alerts can be shown on a manager's home page to warn of upcoming critical dates for performance metrics. In addition, using the System Administration tasks, a performance analyst can set up email notifications to managers to inform them when metrics have reached critical thresholds. Email notifications provide an additional way to ensure that managers are aware of the alert issue.

Email notification for metrics uses the existing Archibus Scheduled Notifications framework to:

  • Send email messages (notifications, reminders, and alerts) to managers when the newly collected metrics' values meet specific notification criteria, such as:
    • The metric value has exceeded one of the High Warning or Critical Limits
    • The metric value is bellow one of the Low Warning or Critical Limits
    • The metric value is outside of the warning interval:
      • The metric value is outside of the critical interval
      • The metric value is not meeting the Report Limit Target.

  • Enable you as the Performance Analyst to create reusable notification templates containing commonly used notification criteria, message contents, and recipients.

  • Automatically resend notifications at configurable intervals until the metric’s value has changed.

Developing Email notifications includes the following steps:

After setting up the notification, you can:

When are notification emails sent?

For any performance metric that is set up to send notifications, the email notifications are triggered by the metric value stored in the table afm_metric_trend_values for the Date Collected. If the value meets the triggering condition, the email notification is sent on the metric’s collection date. The collection date is determined by the recurrence pattern you specify when defining the metric.

For example, if you define a metric's recurrence pattern to be weekly collection occurring every Friday, then each Friday, after the metric value is collected in the “afm_metric_trend_values” table, Archibus sends an email notification if all other notification rules/settings are met

Email notifications and metric granularities

Each metric has at least one granularity assigned to it. A granularity groups metric values by a specific criteria – for example, 'All' (entire portfolio), or 'by Building' (grouped by bl_id). For each notification template, you define the granularities for which Archibus will send notifications.

You can assign one or more granularities to a template. When you assign a metric to a template, the metric definition must include the granularities in the template. If multiple metrics are assigned to the notification template, the definition for each of the metrics must include the granularities used in the template.

Beside the granularity ‘All’, for which Archibus collects only one value for a Collect Date, all other granularities may collect more than one value for the same Date Collected.

For example, if for the metric Work Request Completed, the granularity is set to ‘by Problem Type’ (GROUP BY prob_type), then the metric value on 10/19/2014 might be 139 for the prob_type = ‘TEMP ADJUSTMENT’, 124 for the prob_type = ‘ELECTICAL-LIGHTBULB’, and so on. If you assign this metric and the 'by prob_type' granularity to a template, then a notification is sent if any of the problem type values meets the triggering condition.

Including a hyperlink in the notification template message

The notification message may include a hyperlink to a report, or home page that the recipient can drill down to. If multiple links are needed, it might be helpful to include a link to Archibus Manager Home Page for the application the manager uses. From the Home Page, managers can drill into the alerts to see details for the issues requiring their attention.

You include the link in the template’s email body message definition (messages table), where references to fields can be included within the body text.

For example, you could make the following entry in the message:

See Define Notification Messages.