Notification agents - overview

TARGIT offers many options for exporting data from the system, or for monitoring data within the system.

Monitoring data

Notification Agents are useful when you need to monitor the development of key measures. Notification Agents are scheduled to regularly check the current state of the measure. The current value is then compared to the previous value, and if the pre-defined condition has been met, the Notification Agent will automatically send out an e-mail.

The user sets up the conditions for when the notification should be triggered and how often the thresholds are checked. Notifications can be created from:

• Analyses.
• Scheduled jobs.
• Object Notification Agents.

Monitor data from Analyses

In our Simple Revenue Analysis, we want to be notified whenever there is a change in the revenue for our Salespersons. We have added a This Month dynamic criterion to our analysis so it always shows data from current month. Furthermore, The T-Shirts segment has been selected from the Pie chart.

The notification can be created by right-clicking the value in the crosstab with the salespersons and selecting: Agent / Monitor this value.

After that, a dialog box will open where the user can fine tune the notification. On the first tab, the condition for the notification is set up. You can work with relative changes as well as checks against fixed values.

On the Criteria tab, you can see the criteria for the analysis and the value for the salesperson that you right-clicked. Here you can add and delete criteria.

On the General tab you can name the job that is created on the TARGIT server when the notification has been scheduled and here it might be a good idea to change the job name to something more specific than just Revenue.

The 'User' option let you specify which user credentials should be used when executing the scheduled job.

Furthermore, you can choose to receive messages about errors or warnings that may occur when the scheduled job is running.

On the 'Schedule' tab, you tell the system when and how often this automated job should run. Here we have scheduled the notification to be run at 8 am every day, except weekends, but only if the Sales cube has been processed.

Finally, the delivery information is entered. The texts in Subject and Default explanation are sample texts and will be replaced with the true values when the job runs. You can of course enter your own text in the Message field.

'Include notification context link', will insert a link to the document in the e-mail. The Notification context shows the analysis. You can change the document if you wish.

Include job properties link, will insert a link in the e-mail that opens the scheduled job dialog box.

Use the 'From' setting if you want the mails created from this scheduled job to appear as coming from a specified email address. Otherwise, it will appear as coming from the TARGIT server.

This condition “When revenue changes…” will now monitor your Revenue within the context set by your criteria. Each time this Revenue is looked up by the agent, its value will be stored and compared to the previous value that was looked up. On basis of this comparison, it will be determined whether Revenue has changed or not, and whether an email needs to be sent or not.