How to set up Events and Alerts

With Conserv's sensors, you can define events you want to track and get alerted when their criteria are met.

Conserv's real-time monitoring tools have several advantages over offline data loggers. One of the primary advantages is alerting! For example, you may wish to set alerts when the relative humidity in a space falls outside of a defined safe range, or when the temperature in a space exceeds the recommended maximum. This article will walk you through how to set up events and subscribe to receive alerts to them.

Setting up Events

You can find Events under the Setup tab in Conserv Cloud. Here, administrators can define new events or edit existing ones. Users can edit their subscriptions to events here as well.

Note: longtime Conserv customers may be familiar with our "alerts" feature. We split this feature into "Events" and "Alerts" to allow customers to have more control over things they want to track (events) and things they want to be notified about (alerts). You no longer have to receive alerts for each event you track.

Defining an Event

Defining an event has three parts:

  1. The scope
  2. The triggering criteria
  3. Subscriptions

The scope

Events can be "scoped" to locations, spaces, or individual sensors. Scoping an event to a location or space means that any live sensor in that location or space can trigger the event based on the criteria you specify. It's generally a good idea to scope events to locations or spaces, as this prevents you needing to update your events every time you add, move, or update sensors.

The trigger criteria

The triggering criteria of the event gives you fine-grained control over when an event will be recorded. For example, you can opt to only be notified when readings have been outside of the range you specify for over an hour. The triggering criteria has three parts:

  1. The reading type you want to track (for example, temperature or illuminance)
  2. The threshold that must be met (for example, a value above or below a threshold, or outside a range)
  3. How long the threshold must be met before the event will be started or ended.

Note that not all reading types require each part. For example, you don't need to define a threshold or start/end durations for leak or movement detection, because these events are triggered immediately.

Setting start and stop durations is helpful for making sure you don't receive too many alerts. For example, you may decide you are only worried if the temperature exceeds a certain threshold and stays there for a certain period of time.

Subscriptions

As a final step, you can subscribe people to receive alerts when an event happens. If you create a new event, you will be subscribed by default, but you can change this. You can also subscribe other Conserv users, and even invite non-users to subscribe to receive alerts.

Each subscribed user will receive alerts according to their notification channel preferences in their Settings page.

If you invite someone who is not currently a Conserv user, they will first receive an invite to create a Conserv account. If they accept this invite, they will be automatically subscribed to the event.

Subscribed users receive three types of message:

  1. Subscription confirmation. Each user will receive a confirmation that they have been subscribed to receive alerts for the event, via their preferred notification channel (text message or email).
  2. Event start. Users will receive an alert when an event starts.
  3. Event end. Users will also receive a message when an event ends, so they know the issue is resolved. Note that movement events do not have an end message because they are transitory.

Note: Conserv customers using our legacy "alerts" feature may remember an option to be notified of an event each day it is active. This option has been replaced by the start and stop messages described above. You can also check ongoing events by going to the Events tab in Conserv Cloud, where these events will show an orange "Active" indicator.

Tip: Are you trying to set up a Global Sensor Offline event? Make sure you pick Related to Everywhere and Condition: A sensor has not reported data.