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
- Decide which of the two you are setting. Conditional formatting colours a result inside a report; an alert threshold colours a live data component on a dashboard when a condition is met.
- For a report, open the formatting options and add the condition. The advanced option takes IF THEN ELSE statements, so several ranges of the same metric can each get their own colour, given as a hex code.
- For a live component, set the alert threshold on the component itself.
- Watch for a period before acting on it.
One thing decides whether this works at all: conditional colouring lands on tables. Build the visualisation as a table where the colour is the point, or the rule is set and nothing changes on screen. Note the end date: alert thresholds live on components that Zendesk removes on 25 January 2027, so a threshold you build today has an end date. Real-time monitoring is where this moves.
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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