Through the Event Manager, you can define alerts that are triggered based on Tealeaf events or Top Movers. When threshold values are detected in the related event or Top Mover, an alert is generated and delivered in the appropriate format to the designated recipients.

Note: The Alerts tab is available only if you have licensed cxImpact.

Alerts are defined, configured, and enabled through the Alert tab in the Event Manager.

• You can create up to 2048 alerts, although Tealeaf does not recommend approaching this limit.
• After an alert is created and saved to the server, it may take 30 minutes for the alert definition to be used by the Alert Service. Alert generation and appearance of alerts in the Alert Monitor in the Portal may be impacted.

Types of alerts

There are four types of alerts:

• Event alerts: These alerts are triggered by user-defined events. The events that you create can be used as the trigger for these alerts.
• Top mover alerts: These alerts are triggered by user-defined Top Movers. Values in Top Movers that you create can be used as the trigger for these alerts.
• Top mover report alerts: These alerts are triggered by reports that you have created to track Top Movers and associated dimensional values. Values in Top Mover reports can be used as the trigger for these alerts.
• Canister alerts: These alerts are triggered by any of the status metrics automatically monitored by the Canister. These metrics are available for selection when you create the alert.

Options

The available options are Count (default), Mean, Minimum, Maximum, and Ratio:

Count

Fires an alert when a count threshold was exceeded.

Mean

Fires on percentage deviations from the mean value. The mean is calculated for the window of prior values of width Alert Interval. When Alert Interval values accumulated, the current value is calculated for a 1 minute period immediately following the end of the Alert Interval. This current value is compared to the average of values over the Alert Interval, and an alert is generated if that value differs by the percentage that is specified as Alert Threshold or Warn Threshold. For example, if the specified threshold percentage is 20, then a current value of over 1.2 times the mean value triggers an alert.

The triggering percentage is interpreted as a positive or negative percentage, deviating from the mean value, as defined by the Direction setting.

Minimum or Maximum

Fires on integer count deviations from either the minimum or maximum value. The extremes are for the window of prior values of width Alert Interval. When Alert Interval values accumulated, the current value is compared to the Minimum or Maximum of values over that interval and an alert is generated if that value differs by the count that is specified as Alert Threshold or Warn Threshold. The triggering deviation can be specified as either positive or negative. The available options are Positive (default) and Negative. Selecting Negative sends a flag to signal that this is a negative alert. This results in alerting when less than, rather than greater than.

Ratio

Fires a warning or alert when the ratio of the incidences of this event to an arbitrarily selected denominator event exceeds a fractional threshold. When the Ratio option is selected, percentage signs appear next to the Threshold field values. The ratio is X/Y, where Y is a counter-event. Select a sampling interval that yields actual statistically meaningful results.

Alert configuration properties

• Only events whose Display in Portal flag was sent to true are available for selection.
• Alert threshold values must be greater than zero. For Top Mover, Top Mover report, and event ratio alerts, you may enter decimal values. For other alert types, entered values must be integers.
• For Mean alerts, the Alert threshold field accepts values as integer percentages, representing percentage deviations of a sample value from an AlertService calculated mean value.
• A negative Direction for an alert results in alerting when a value less than the Alert Threshold was recorded.
• Alert interval values range from 1 to 1440 minutes (24 hours).

  Note: Because the alert service operates on time-based intervals, you cannot configure alerts to fire on each page or for each occurrence of the underlying event.

• Warning threshold values must be greater than zero. For Top Mover, Top Mover report, and event ratio alerts, you may enter decimal values. For other alert types, entered values must be integers.
• For Mean alerts, the Warning threshold field accepts values as integer percentages, representing percentage deviations of a sample value from an AlertService calculated mean value.

Alert notification properties

• The email addresses for the recipients has a maximum of 255 characters.
• The Alerts log file (Alerts_YYYYMMDD.log) is created when one or more alerts has the XML log file option enabled.

Ratio alerts

When you create ratio alerts, timestamps for events are assigned in real time, while session-end events for alerts receive a timestamp when the session closes, which may be in a different alert time period window. Unexpected ratio counts may be generated if these two types of events are mixed in ratio alerts. Whenever possible, compare events with the same execution timeframe.

Note: In the generated ratio alert, drill-down is disabled.

• The type of denominator for the event can be one of the following:
  • Event List - List of values that are specified in the whitelist for a selected event. When this option is selected, click Select Event link to open the Event Selector.
  • Page Count - A count of pages in a 1-minute interval
  • Session Count - A count of sessions in a 1-minute interval
• The Min. Value setting determines when a ratio event has enough samples to be meaningful. For example, the denominator must be at least the number in this field before the threshold is evaluated.
• Alert threshold values must be greater than zero. For ratio alerts, you can enter decimal values.
• An alert with a negative Direction results when a value less than the Alert Threshold was recorded.
• The Alert Interval is the time in minutes to accumulate the event values for alerting. The interval is a rolling window of time. Values range from 1 to 1440 minutes (24 hours).

  Note: Because the alert service operates on time-based intervals, you cannot configure alerts to fire on each page or for each occurrence of the underlying event.

• For Mean alerts, the Warning Threshold field accepts values as integer percentages, representing percentage deviations of a sample value from an AlertService calculated mean value.

  Threshold values must be greater than zero. For Top Mover, Top Mover report, and event ratio alerts, you may enter decimal values. For other alert types, entered values must be integers.

Canister alerts

A  canister alert is a Tealeaf alert that is triggered when a threshold was exceeded on one of the statistics that are generated from the canisters.

A canister can process a high volume of data, so you can create canister alerts to identify when potential issues might be occurring in the canister. By monitoring one or more threshold levels in the reported Canister statistics, you can alert the appropriate personnel before a potential issue causes a significant problem. The Canister statistics are also published in the Portal in a System Status report.