Alerts fire regardless of goal

I’m trying to set up alerts in Metabase (v0.31.1) to alert us to any sudden drop in figures. So I’ve been creating line charts with a goal line, and setting up alerts to fire only when the number ‘Goes below the goal line’, ‘Every time’ it crosses. However, I seem to get Slack alerts every time it checks even if the number hasn’t dropped below the goal line.

I’ve tried adjusting the settings and changing goal line values and the alerts seem to fire regardless of what I set things to. Anyone else run into this?

Incidentally, the alert setup UI seems pretty buggy - if I disable email alerts when creating the alert initially, that setting change isn’t saved. If I re-open the alert settings it will still have the email option enabled. If I toggle it off again it saves it correctly as off, but if I go to delete the alert then I need to check the box for ‘This alert will no longer be emailed to 1 address’ as well as the Slack channel even though it isn’t being emailed anywhere.

Hi, I'm using Metabase v0.32.8 and it seems that I have the same problem: it's very confusing because I receive an alert everyday, whether it crosses the goal line or not. I've tried different configurations without success.

Here, my time serie is a percentage [0, 1] with a goal line at 90% and a trigger below the goal line. But I receive the slack alert everyday even when I'm over it:

It actually sounds more like a pulse than an actual alert. Which is OK if we take it as is but then it's missing a feature.

Is it just me who's unable to use the alerts properly or is it a general problem?
I check the more recent versions but didn't seem to get fixed there.

Hi @Quentin
There’s a bunch of other fixes in 0.32.10 compared to 0.32.8, so I would recommend upgrading - always backup before upgrading!
My first guess would be that you’re getting the alert because it actually is below the goal, since you’re watching a 30 day period.
What if you changed the query to just show 1 day, since that’s the alert you want to receive?

Hi @flamber, first of all thanks for your answer.
Yes, upgrading is always good but I'm dependent on my infrastructure team on that one, hence the check on the functionality too. My version ain't that old after all.

About your suggestion, it could make sense but the alert show yesterday's value, not an average of 30 days.
Selection_122

Also, if it's a daily check, why check the whole period by default. It's kind of weird, you'd expect fresh news from an alert. Plus it's supposed to be a time serie, not a one value metric.

I'll check it anyway, just in case it was the right move.

Do you use alerts yourself? Does it work?

@Quentin

Good questions. I don’t use pulses and alerts that much - I have a different trigger-system.

But you can set goal for non-period charts (i.e. sales grouped by store), so then your way of thinking about the alert would not work for those.

I know some area managers - in one of the companies I help - have setup different types of non-period alerts, so they receive a message in the morning of all the stores that did/not reach the goal yesterday. And those questions are only based on one day. Then they have other questions/dashboard which show a filterable periods for better overview (usually a month).

Let’s try to ping @maz to see if he can shed some light on this. I doubt we will get an answer this week, since the entire team is working very hard to finish 0.33.0

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