Notifications — Rules, Groups & Channels
~5 min readNotifications — Rules, Groups & Channels
Notifications tell you when a card's goal status changes, so you don't have to keep a dashboard open. Alerts can be delivered to Email, Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Open the Notifications & alerts panel with the 🔔 bell in the dashboard bar. It has three tabs: Rules, Groups and Channels.
Rules
A rule says which card to watch, which status changes to alert on, and where to send the alert. Rules on this tab belong to the dashboard you're viewing.
Creating an alert rule
- On the Rules tab, click + New rule.
- What to watch — choose a card on this dashboard.
- When to send — choose Alert (trigger mode) and select one or more triggers:
| Trigger | Fires when the card… |
|---|---|
| Goal reached | reaches or exceeds its goal |
| Goal missed | becomes Critical (or is projected to miss) |
| At risk | becomes At Risk |
| Any status change | changes status in either direction. This can't be combined with the specific triggers. |
You can combine specific triggers, for example "Goal missed" and "At risk".
- Re-fire cooldown — how often the same alert may repeat:
| Cooldown | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Every time (no cooldown) | Sent every time the condition is detected |
| At most once per hour | Repeats suppressed for 60 minutes |
| At most once every 4 hours | Suppressed for 4 hours |
| At most once every 12 hours | Suppressed for 12 hours |
| At most once per day | Suppressed for 24 hours |
| At most once per week | Suppressed for 7 days |
- Where to send — click one or more saved channels to select them, and/or type email addresses and press Enter for one-off recipients (these belong to this rule only and don't need a saved channel).
- Review the plain-language summary, then save the rule.
The panel lists each rule with its trigger and where it delivers. Use the rule's menu to pause (it won't fire until re-enabled), re-enable, or delete it.
When alerts are checked
Alert rules are evaluated about once an hour, using each card's most recent data, so an alert can arrive up to an hour or so after a card's status changes. A card that is paused or has no data doesn't fire alerts.
What you receive
Each alert names the dashboard and card, the new status, and the card's current value. Email alerts are sent from dashboardSMASHBOARD to the addresses you chose; Slack and Teams alerts arrive as a message in the channel your webhook points to.
Alerts use the same status labels as your cards. If you've changed the wording in Dashboard Preferences, notifications follow it.
Channels
A channel is a reusable destination — an email address, a Slack webhook, or a Teams webhook. Channels belong to your account, so a channel you add is available to rules on every dashboard.
Adding a channel
- Open the Channels tab and add a channel.
- Choose the type:
- Email — enter the recipient's address.
- Slack — enter an Incoming Webhook URL from your Slack app (it must start with
https://). - Teams — enter a webhook URL created with Power Automate / Workflows (it must start with
https://).
- Give it a label that tells you what it's for — "Growth team", "#traffic-alerts", "Leadership".
- Save.
To edit or remove a channel, use the channel's menu. Removing a channel stops any rule that used it from sending there.
Webhook URLs are secrets. Anyone with a Slack or Teams webhook URL can post to that channel, so treat it like a password.
Groups
A group bundles rules across multiple dashboards into a named collection with its own delivery schedule — useful for a weekly roll-up covering every team's dashboard in one digest.
Each group row shows the group name, its schedule, a description, and the dashboards it covers. Click the ··· menu on any group row to edit or delete it. Click + New group at the bottom of the list to create one.
Groups vs. Rules: Rules watch a single dashboard and fire on status changes or on a per-dashboard schedule. Groups aggregate rules across dashboards and deliver on a group-level schedule, independent of any one dashboard's rules.
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