Use alerts

In this video, I’m going to show you how to use the alerts feature in Adobe Experience Platform. Alerts allow you to subscribe to event-based messages related to various processes. Once your organization has implemented and started using Platform, you can use alerts to make sure things are running smoothly. For example, a data engineer can use alerts to monitor data ingestion processes, while a marketer could use them to make sure that their segment jobs are running smoothly. The alerts screen is under administration in the left navigation. On the browse tab, you can see all of the out-of-the-box alerts provided by Adobe. You can use the search box or a filters at the top to locate a particular alert or type of alert.

The alerts are provided out-of-the-box by various Adobe teams. Expect this list to grow in future releases. You can see the name of the alert, which service it’s related to, whether or not it’s enabled, and the last time the alert was triggered. Clicking on an alert opens the sidebar, which exposes additional details. Now, some alerts we call life cycle alerts. These are generated from an important event in the life cycle of a process, such as it completed or failed. Other alerts we refer to as metric alerts and these indicate things like a process that hasn’t completed in an expected timeframe. For example, this alert triggers when a segment job takes longer to process than a defined threshold. It’ll keep evaluating at the frequency specified and automatically change the alert status when the process completes.

Now, even though this alert evaluates every 30 seconds, it’s only going to notify you when the alert first triggers. An important distinction between the life cycle alerts and the metric alerts is that only the metric alerts will list a last triggered timestamp and display in the history tab. For each enabled alert, a user can decide whether or not they’d like to subscribe to it. Depending on your user permissions, you might also be able to enable or disable the alert for other users. Alerts will be emailed to the address associated with your Adobe ID. They’re also visible up here in the notifications area of the interface. Here’s an alert related to a source’s flow run failing. To find out more information, I can click on the notification and I’ll be taken directly to the details of the flow run where I can see that there is an error with my data. To see the alerts in the notifications area, you have to enable platform notifications, which you can do by clicking here in the gear icon, scrolling and using the toggle.

The ability to view and manage alerts is controlled in the Adobe AdminConsole where administrators can decide granular permissions related to platform features. For example, a user with a view alerts permission item can subscribe or unsubscribe to alerts, while someone with managed alerts can disable or enable an alert for other users.

Like with everything in platform, you can also interact with alerts via the API. You can subscribe to these events in the developer console and configure your own custom alert mechanisms using web hooks. I hope you enjoyed this overview of alerts. Stay alert. -