Data Alerts - New Feature in SSRS 2012

Data Alerts

Reporting Services data alerts are a data-driven alerting solution that informs you about changes in report data that are of interest to you, and at a relevant time.

Imagine a sales report that contains information such as year-to-day sales, average monthly sales, and sales targets for sales persons by territory. As a sales person, you would like to know how you are doing. By creating a data alert on the sales report, you can receive messages whenever year-to-date sales exceed or fall below a specified value or contain data that you consider noteworthy. Rules in the data alert definition specify the data values to trigger the data alert. By using AND and OR operators in the rules you can combine many clauses into complex rules that define precisely the report data values you want to be notified of.

In some cases, the presence of any data in a report is of interest. For example, a report that lists cancelled orders becomes interesting when the first cancellation occurs. You can create data alerts on reports in which the presence of data, rather than specific data values, is important.

Data alerts messages are sent by email. Depending on the importance of the information, you can choose to send alert messages more or less frequently and only when results change. You can specify multiple recipients for the alert messages and this way keep others informed and enhance efficiency and collaboration. If you want to send alert messages immediately, you can run data alerts directly instead of waiting for them to run automatically at the scheduled time.

The following summarizes the key areas of data alerting:

• Define and save data alert definitions—User views a report, adds a data alert, creates rules that identify interesting data values, defines recurrence patterns for sending the alert, and specifies the recipients of the data alert message.
• Run data alert definitions—Alerting service runs data alert definitions at a scheduled time, retrieves report data, and triggers data alerts based on the rules in the alert definition.
• Deliver data alert messages to recipients—Alerting service creates an alert instance and sends data alert messages by email to recipients.

Data alerts provide the following tools for creating and managing data alert instances and definitions:

• Data Alert Designer—Users create and edit data alert definitions.
• Data Alert Manager for users—Users view information about their data alerts, delete their data alert definitions, or open alert definitions for editing.
• Data Alert Manager for alerting administrators—Alerting administrators view a list of data alerts created by all users on the SharePoint site and delete alerts.