Why use analytics alerts?
Alerts notify you when a metric crosses a threshold you care about. Instead of checking dashboards manually, you can set up alerts to surface important changes automatically — a sudden drop in signups, a spike in errors, or a conversion rate falling below target.
Creating an alert
- Navigate to Alerts in your analytics project.
- Click New Alert.
- Configure the alert with the settings described below.
- Click Save to activate it.
Choosing a metric
Select the metric you want to monitor. This can be any metric you have defined, or you can create a new one inline. Common metrics for alerts include:
- Event count — Alert when a specific event occurs more or fewer times than expected.
- Unique users — Alert when the number of active users drops below a threshold.
- Conversion rate — Alert when a goal's conversion rate falls below target.
- Error rate — Alert when error events exceed a safe level.
Setting thresholds
Thresholds define the condition that triggers the alert. Configure these settings:
- Operator — Choose from: is above, is below, increases by more than, or decreases by more than.
- Value — The threshold number. For percentage-based operators (increases/decreases by), this is a percentage.
- Time window — The period over which the metric is evaluated: last hour, last 24 hours, last 7 days, etc.
Examples:
- Alert when daily signups is below 50 in the last 24 hours.
- Alert when error events is above 100 in the last hour.
- Alert when conversion rate decreases by more than 20% compared to the previous 7 days.
Configuring notification channels
Choose how you want to be notified when an alert triggers:
Alerts can be sent to one or more email addresses. Add individual addresses or select team members from your Userorbit team.
Slack
Connect your Slack workspace to receive alerts in a specific channel. This is useful for team-wide visibility — everyone in the channel sees the alert immediately.
To set up Slack notifications:
- Go to Settings > Integrations and connect your Slack workspace if you have not already.
- When creating an alert, select Slack as the notification channel.
- Choose the Slack channel where alerts should be posted.
Webhook
For custom integrations, send alert payloads to a webhook URL. The payload includes the metric name, current value, threshold, and timestamp. Use webhooks to connect alerts to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or your own internal tools.
Managing alert rules
View and manage all your alerts from the Alerts page:
- Enable/disable — Toggle an alert on or off without deleting it. Useful during known maintenance windows.
- Edit — Update the metric, threshold, or notification settings.
- View history — See when the alert has triggered in the past, including the metric value at each trigger.
- Delete — Remove an alert permanently.
Avoiding alert fatigue
Too many alerts, or alerts that trigger too often, lead to alert fatigue — your team starts ignoring them. Keep your alerts effective with these practices:
- Set meaningful thresholds — Only alert on values that require action. A 2% dip in daily signups may be normal variance; a 30% drop is worth investigating.
- Use cooldown periods — Configure a minimum time between repeated alerts for the same rule. This prevents a flood of notifications during an ongoing incident.
- Review regularly — Archive or delete alerts that no longer correspond to active priorities.
- Start with a few critical alerts — Monitor your top 3-5 metrics first. Add more alerts as you learn what levels of change are meaningful for your product.
Alert best practices
- Pair each alert with a clear action plan — who investigates, and what are the first steps?
- Use Slack channels for time-sensitive alerts and email for daily or weekly summaries.
- Test your alerts by temporarily lowering thresholds to confirm notifications arrive correctly.
- Document your alert rules in your team's runbook so new team members understand what each alert means.