Help › Running your workspace
Alert rules and shadow mode
What's worth waking someone for, and how to check a rule before it pages anyone.
Writing a rule
- Go to Rules and choose New rule.
- Choose the queue (On which queue), or every queue.
- Choose what to Watch for:
- Contacts waiting in a queue
- Longest wait, in seconds
- Agents available drops below
- Service level (answered within a target), at 20, 30 or 60 seconds
- Contact flow errors (whole instance), per 5 minutes
- Set the threshold, and For at least how long it must hold: any single reading, or 2, 5, 10 or 30 minutes. Figures arrive once a minute.
- Choose how it pages (When this fires) and who (Pages). Whoever covers the queue is usually right: Standby pages the rotation that covers the queue and is on duty at that moment, preferring a team that covers just that queue over one that covers every queue. Choose a rotation by name only to always page that team; when it's off duty, nobody is paged.
Thresholds are "more than", not "at least". "More than 1 contact waiting" fires at 2. To be told about a single waiting contact, use a threshold of 0.
How it pages
- Push only — no call, ever.
- Push, then call. The usual choice: a notification first, then a phone call if nobody acknowledges. During someone's quiet hours, they get a quiet notification instead of a call.
- Push, then call, even during quiet hours. For the things worth waking someone for at any hour. Its notifications can break through Do Not Disturb on phones that allow it.
A rule fires once per problem, not once a minute, and arms again only after the problem clears.
Shadow mode
Every new rule starts Pending: for 7 days it records what it would have done, and pages nobody. Choose Review to see how often it would have paged, how many were duplicates, and how many fell between 10pm and 6am. If those look like moments worth being woken for, choose Promote to live. If not, change the threshold.
- To go live sooner, choose Promote early… and give a reason. It's recorded on the rule.
- Changing what a rule watches sends it back to Pending. Changing its name, rotation or paging doesn't.
- Disable stops a rule straight away; re-enabling starts a fresh week of shadow.
Trying a rule
Rules → Simulate: enter a queue, a reading and how long it's been true, and choose Show what would happen. Nothing is sent and nobody is called.