Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Professional or higher, Explore Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
Marking when a number is out of bounds, and the discipline that stops alerts becoming background noise.
Set one
- Open the report or component.
- Set the threshold and what counts as good, warning and bad.
- Choose how it is shown.
- Watch for a period before acting on it.
Base the threshold on your data
Look at the last three months before choosing a number. A target picked from a round figure or from another company's benchmark will either never fire or fire constantly.
The test: what happens when it fires
If the answer is "somebody looks at it", the threshold is decoration. A threshold worth setting has an action attached and a person who takes it.
Colour means something or nothing
Three states at most. A dashboard where five things are amber has taught its readers to ignore amber, and it will keep doing so when something real happens.
Alerts that fire daily are noise
Within a fortnight nobody sees them. If one fires most days, either the threshold is wrong or the underlying problem is permanent and needs a different response.
Watch before you commit
Set it, leave it a month, and see how often it fires and whether those were the moments that mattered. Tuning after that is a small adjustment; tuning after people have started ignoring it is much harder.
Say what the threshold is
On the dashboard. A red number with no stated target invites the reader to invent one, and they will invent a stricter one than you set.
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