What are Metrics?
Metrics in PushMetrics are values stored in a time-series that can have one or multiple filter dimensions.
Metrics can be used to
- create alert rules to monitor important changes in metrics and/or to trigger reports based on changes in data
- query and access important KPIs in our web app
- send simple KPI reports to Slack or via email (coming soon)
- query KPIs directly in Slack (coming soon)
Metrics are collected on a recurring basis (up to every 5 minutes) and alert rules will be evaluated after every import of the metrics.
Existing time series vs. taking snapshots
PushMetrics can handle both existing time series by importing historic data or - in case there is no time dimension in the source data - collect snapshots of the source data and build up a time series on it's own.
That means you can store and track data as a time series, even if you are not keeping a history of the data anywhere yet.
How Alerts work
Once you have Metrics in you account, you can create alert rules. An alert rule evaluates a criteria you specified against the latest imported data of a metric. If the criteria is evaluating to true, an alert will be fired. As a result, you receive a message in Slack or via Email or you can trigger an existing report that you have set up in PushMetrics.
For example, you could send a report with a thorough analysis of your margin and trigger that when your margin drops below a certain threshold.
An alert will be triggered only once for a set of data. If the next import job doesn't add new data to the metric, the alert will not fire again.
Currently, you can create alert rules based on a fixed threshold or based on a change (or % change) compared to a previous value.
We'll add more alert rule options in the future.
