5.9 Set alerts on a tile - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Okay, So in this sub lesson</v> we're going to discuss what an alert is and why you might want to use one. We'll learn how to set alerts. We'll talk about receiving alerts and then subsequent management and alerts, and then we're going to discuss some considerations and limitations. Okay, so we can see that we are on our sales analysis dashboard here. So we're gonna do is go ahead and take a look at first why we would want to sit alert and what one is. So anytime we're doing analytics we're generally always interested in whenever certain boundaries have been crossed. So either we've gone above a certain threshold or we've gone below a certain threshold and then we want to take some action. So wouldn't it be nice if we had our tools set up so that we could be notified of when those activities actually happen versus having to go look for them ourselves. So this is where alerts come in. Okay, so let's go ahead and actually get an alert set. So I'm going to do here is I'm going to go to the KPI tile and at the very top right hand side of the tile shelf there's three little dots and I'm just going to click this and say, manage alerts. And then we're gonna get our manage alerts dialog box that pops up and we can see at this point in time there are currently no alerts set. So let's go ahead and look to build an alert on this particular tile. So what I'm first gonna do here is click on this add alert rule. And we can see right now that a default looks like it's been set for this alert. So you keep in mind when we built this particular keypad tile back on the desktop, we had set it up so that there was a target of $35 million. So let's go in here and actually set some stuff up for us here. We may or may not want this but let's just go ahead and delete this. I'm just gonna go ahead and delete this rule because this isn't one we want. And now let's go and click this add alert rules. And once again, we're back in here. So it's always going to give us this default here. So let's go ahead and modify this here. So maybe we want to go ahead and set an alert up that says whenever we go above $45 million then we want to go ahead and have an alert set. So let's go ahead and do that. So first let's go ahead and give this a title. So I'm going to say, alert for total sales over 45 million. So this go over 45M something like that just so we have a good title on it and then we can say whenever the total sales goes above $45 million, what do we want to do? All right, so those are the other configuration parameters we want to talk about here. So what we can do here is we can say there's a maximum notification frequency. So whenever the data set is refreshed we can then have it alerted. Alert us at most every 24 hours. So do we want to be notified every 24 hours or do we want it most once an hour? So just to reminder that alerts are only if your data actually changes. So if your data is only refresh once a month for example and that refresh happens and you happen to go over top of this $45 million you'll get the alert there and then that's it. You won't get anything until that data set has been refreshed again or this notification frequency period has been tripped. Okay, so a couple of other things may want to do here with the alerts is to go ahead and tell Power BI where do you want to receive the notifications? So you will by default receive notifications on the service in notification center. So that is up here at the very top of the screen in these three little ellipsis here where we've got this notifications. So I'm not gonna click on that yet because I don't wanna lose my dialogue box here. So let's get ourselves back down alerts and you can actually have an email be sent too. So you can either turn that off or on depending on what your preferences are. Okay, so that's good. So let's go ahead and click save and close. All right so now we have our alerts set. So if our data set was to go ahead and get refreshed and we tripped that $45 million then the alerting process would go ahead and kick off and send something into our notification center and actually send us an email as well because that's how we had this all configured. So if I wanna get back to the configuration alert once again, I click on the three dots here, I go back to the manage alerts and this time we're gonna see that we actually have the title here, the alert for a total sales already over $45 million which is the one we just created. And then I can go in here and reconfigured, if I want. I can go ahead and make it an inactive alert, save it. And then I can come back in here at a later date if I want to go ahead and re-enable, is just to open it up and say, make it active again. So a few different things that we can go ahead and do with our alerts. Okay, so just some of the considerations and limitations that you need to understand about alerts is that alerts only work with numeric data types. Alerts only work on refresh data. They won't work on static data sets, which makes sense because you need the data set to be refreshed in order, for an order for your limitations to be tripped. Alerts only work on streaming data if you build a KPI card or a gauge so that is one of the other limitations on alerts is the fact that you can only do it on KPIs cards and gauges. And alerts aren't sported for card tiles with date-time measure. So if you have daytime measures on the card tiles, they won't work either. And finally keep in mind that alerts are personal, so they're for you and you only. So if you go ahead and share this dashboard out those alerts will not go along with it. One other thing to just note on alerts here let's just go ahead and show you in here is if I go back to my actual alert here, if you do feel you wanna go ahead and enhance alerts and do a little bit more with them you do have the ability to use Microsoft Power Automate to trigger additional actions. That's beyond the scope of this class here but that is a way to go ahead and do more with alerting over and above what you can actually do inside of Power BI. But that does require an additional skillset and some additional licensing which you may or may not have. But I just wanna point that out that that ability is actually there. All right so that brings us to the end of the sub lesson.