Tableau Pulse: Unfavorable Trend Alerts

What is the alert condition?

Even prior to this feature, Pulse had an insight type called “New Trend”. Users could see content about this on the detail page for a metric by leveraging the ‘ask’ experience if such a condition existed. Instead of having users hunt for this information, Pulse will be alerting on it. 

If an “unfavorable” new trend is found, the alert will trigger. “Unfavorable” is determined by the “value going up” setting on the definition. If this setting is ‘neutral’, then users will not receive alerts about new trends.

I have data that tends to fluctuate, will you just constantly notify me of new trends?

Pulse considers “seasonality” (patterns) in the historical trend. Therefore, in an extreme example, you should not get alerts every Sunday because the store is closed and sales have dropped. 

If you alerted me to a new unfavorable trend, but the metric is still trending in that unfavorable direction, will you keep alerting me?

The ‘avoid spam’ aspect is baked into this feature. If you are alerted on Day 0 of a new unfavorable trend (call it ‘Trend x’), from an objective perspective, you would probably still consider that trend ‘new’, even on Day 2 or even maybe Day 6. However, Pulse is applying a unique identifier to the trend it notices and once it alerts about ‘Trend X’, then it won’t alert about that same trend again.

However, if Trend X is considered an unfavorable new trend and after a bit, the trend changes to become even steeper in an unfavorable direction, that could be detected as another ‘new unfavorable trend’ and then we’d have a “Trend Y”, which would trigger a new alert.

How often is Pulse checking for alerts?

For any given site, Pulse is checking all followed metrics for alert conditions when daily digests are run. This means that if digest runs are set to start at 2 a.m. (by using the digest send time site setting), then starting at 2 a.m. every day, all followed metrics will be evaluated for alert conditions. 

Pulse is not doing this site-wide evaluation of followed metrics any more than once in a 24 hour period by default. If you change the digest send time on your site in such a way that a digest run is started more than once in a 24 hour period, Pulse will do this ‘check’, but conditions discussed later on will prevent a user from being spammed with the same alert in this case.

How will I know about an alert?

If you are following a metric and an alert is discovered for it, you will see content about that alert in your daily digest*. In addition, if you have the Tableau Mobile App and the app is running, you will receive a notification of the alert on your mobile device. Lastly, if you go into the Pulse web experience in Tableau, you will see a notice of the alert on your homepage of followed metrics and on the individual detail page for the metric itself. The Alert notification will only last 24 hours from the time it is generated. 

*In order to guarantee that you receive content about the alert as soon as it is found, you must be subscribed to ‘daily’ digests. If you, for example only receive ‘weekly digests’ and the alert is discovered any other day of the week besides when the weekly digest runs, you will not see content in your digests about it. You will still get the mobile notification. Even if you didn’t get content about the alert in your digest, you would see it when you logged into Tableau to look at your followed metrics.

How long do I see the alert badges and content?

Once an alert is triggered, you will only see content about that alert on the web for at most 24 hours. Once digests run again and the alert is not found, you will no longer see content about it in the Pulse web experience or within your daily digests.

What if I’m not following a metric and I just end up on one matching the alert criteria?

For this March 25 release, if you are not following the metric with the alert condition, you will not see any content about ‘the alert’ on your home page or on the detail page for that particular metric. This will be a future capability. 

If I force quit out of the Tableau Mobile App will I still get notifications?

No. For this March 25 release, the Tableau App has to be running on your device in order to receive the notifications. An experience where you still receive alerts even when the app is not running is a future enhancement.

Can I turn off alerts?

There is no ‘turn off alerts’ toggle in Pulse. However, for “unfavorable new trend alerts”, if the insight type is disabled in the definition editor, the insight will not run and therefore an alert cannot be found.

It is important to note that if you see the alert content on the home page or detail page and immediately go and turn off the insight, those badges will not disappear. Once the 24 hour window is up and Pulse starts the digest run and looks for alerts, from that point forward, unfavorable new trend alerts will not appear for that metric. In order to make sure that alerts never appeared ever, the insight would have to be disabled on every definition. More “alert management” capabilities will come later in Pulse. For Mobile Alerts, you can disable Alerts in Tableau App in your OS settings.