Introduction

Alerts from FullStory help you know if your users are succeeding or struggling--even when you aren’t logged in to FullStory.

FullStory gives you visibility into how your users are engaging with your website. You already save interactions you care about as Segments. Alerts from FullStory help you know how those segments are performing.

Alerts can help you answer important business questions like:

• Is there an increase or decrease in the number of successful purchases on my checkout page?
• We just launched a new feature, are we seeing any increases in funnel completion or engagement?
• I want to know if the number of rage clicks is increasing on my site.
• I want to be alerted if more people than usual have a first contentful paint time greater than 5 seconds on mobile. 

How It Works

Overview:

1. Save a segment that you'd like to keep tabs on. You can set alerts on the number of users in that segment. 
2. Create an alert for that segment by choosing a threshold number - you will be notified when the number of users goes above or below the threshold number you set.
3. Create a description for your alert and decide if you'd like to be notified by Slack or email.
4. Save and then go about your work, and FullStory will notify you when your threshold number is passed!

Step by Step:

Create a New Alert

1. Navigate to Library > Segments

2. Choose a saved segment or create a new segment that you would like to be alerted on.

3. Click on the 🔔 icon to create a new alert.

4. You can create an alert based on daily, weekly, and monthly actives. You can also compare numbers to a prior period. Choose which view you’d like to be alerted on by clicking the ⬅ arrow next to "Create Threshold Alert" and then click “Create Alert” once you've made your selection.

5. When you receive an alert, you'll see the segment name associated with the alert. To help provide extra context--and know how to respond-- you can add a description (“Purpose”). This will remind you what to do when this alert is triggered.

   • For instance, if you create an alert for rage clicks the description might read "Uh oh, looks like we have a problem with Rage Clicks. Let's see what's confusing!"

6. Toggle greater than or fewer than options according to your preference for the alert.

7. Type or select the threshold value at which you would like an alert to be triggered. 

   • When the threshold you have chosen is crossed, we will check and send you an alert within ~30-60 minutes. See "Special Considerations" below for more details on how the magic happens.

8. Under Your Notifications you can:

   • Connect the Slack integration

   • Choose a channel to receive notifications if you already have the Slack integration with FullStory

   • Check the box next to In-app or Email as your notification options

9. Click Save to finalize the setting. 

10. Upon being alerted, you can navigate to Notifications from the universal sidebar and view the history of the alert as well as see every time it has fired.

View Your Configured Alerts

You can find all of the alerts that you have created by clicking Notifications in the left-hand navigation. A pink badge indicates that you have new alerts to view.

After clicking the bell, you’ll receive a menu of your configured alerts, and see any recently triggered alert notifications at the top of the menu. 

Sharing Alerts 

Currently, you cannot choose a list of your teammates to also receive an alert you have set. However, you can share your alerts with your team, and then your teammates can opt-in to receive notifications if they want. 

To share an alert with your teammate

1. While in the expanded alerts view, copy the URL string from the browser bar and send it to your teammate.

2. Upon clicking on the URL, your teammate will be prompted to login to FullStory and will land in this view. Then they can select the checkboxes next to the notifications they'd like to receive and click "Save".

To subscribe to a previously configured alert

1. If an alert is already configured, you can subscribe to it by checking In App or Email under Your Notifications to the right of the User Trends card. 

2. Alternatively, ask your teammate to send the URL of the alert so you can update your notification settings.

Special Considerations

Threshold Concept

• The threshold is a "greater than" or "less than" line, not "greater than or equal to" or "less than or equal to".
  • Example: If 0 people have been on my new page and I want to be alerted of the first visitor, my alert should be "above 0", not "above 1".
• FullStory won't notify you continuously when the value is over/below your threshold, but just notify you when the threshold is crossed. So the value will have to dip back down/go back over the threshold to trigger the alert again.
  • For example, when alert is set to "above 0", FullStory observes these values:
  • 0, 1 (alert fires), 2, 2, 3, 0, 1 (alert fires)
  • Alert will only fire on the occurrences when the line crosses from 0 to 1.

Timing

It could take up to 1 hour for an alert to fire.

• Every half hour, we compute the active user count over the last 24 hours to see if events occurred.
• It can additionally take 15-30 minutes for an event to get indexed.
  • Example: So if the triggering event occurs at 9:00 am, it could take up until 10:00 AM for the alert to fire (indexing time, plus up to 30 minutes to wait for the alert check).

What is a 24 hour rolling window?

Typically at FullStory, we show you “daily active users who fit your segment” during the 24 hours between midnight-midnight. For alerts, if we used the standard fixed midnight-midnight time window, we would only be able to send you notifications about your segments right at midnight, or the next morning. However, we really wanted to be able to notify you about your customer experience as close to realtime as we could. It didn't feel helpful to make you wait until 9 am the next day to find out that your site is broken.

So for alerts notifications, we’ve implemented a “rolling 24 hour window” where we look at the past 24 hours to know when to alert you. This means that you will see the User Trends graph (which will only show you the last value from midnight the night before), but when you get a notification, we’ll zoom in and show you the last 24 hours, which won’t necessarily match up exactly with the User Trends graph.