The Basics

Spider Impact is a tool that encourages communication and collaboration. It helps you stay up-to-date on how every area of your organization is performing. You and your team can browse the various application sections exploring things like dashboards and reports, but it's also incredibly helpful when Spider Impact lets you know when there's something that needs your attention. That's where Alerts come in.

Whenever you get an alert in Spider Impact, you'll get an email (unless you've turned that off). You'll also see that alert on the Alerts page in the Home section.

Application-Wide Alerts

Spider Impact works best when users have to configure as little as possible. With this in mind, there are several types of alerts that you can turn on for every user in the software.

1. Red KPIs without tasks will send an alert to any KPI owner when that KPI turns red and it doesn't have an initiative related item to correct the KPI performance.
2. Note replied to will alert the author of any note when it gets a new reply.
3. Red KPIs upon turning red will send an alert to the KPI owner when any KPI turns red.
4. KPI update reminders will send out alerts to KPI updaters to remind them to update their KPI values when they haven’t yet done so. In the example above, Spider Impact will send out alerts 15 days before the period is over to help people get their data in ahead of time, as well as 3 days after to remind people who have forgotten.
5. Notify owners of parents of linked items when source is modified will send the owners of linked scorecard items an alert when the source is edited or moved.

Finally, you can set an email size limit (6) to prevent Spider impact from attaching files larger than your email server can handle. Instead, your email will contain a link that allows you to download the file from the web.

Creating a New Alert

To create an Alert, just go to the Overview tab in the Scorecards section and click on the Alert button in the header. In this example we don't have any alerts set for the "Total Revenue" KPI, so we'll click the "Edit Alerts" button.

This opens the Edit Alerts dialog where we can add an alert for things like the Score or KPI value changing, or when someone adds a Note to this scorecard item or anything underneath it in the tree.

After you create an alert for a scorecard item, the Alert icon now turns blue. This is similar to the bookmark icon turning blue when you have a bookmark for the item.

In addition to being able to create alerts for Scorecard items, you can also subscribe to be alerted when Dashboards and Briefings are published. That's covered in the Subscribing and Publishing article.

Broadcast Alerts

You can manually send alert messages to specific people or teams. That's covered in the Broadcast Alerts article.

Managing Alerts

You can manage all of your Alerts in the My Alerts page in the Admin section, which also includes the ability to including create new Alerts.

By default, Spider Impact will send you an email notification immediately when you get an Alert. You can change this to send emails nightly, weekly, or never.