Alerting concepts

Review the following concepts to understand the components that are used in Alerting.

Weather alerts

A catalog of weather alerts, formerly known as weather perils, is available in Environmental Intelligence Suite. Weather alerts are listed on the Samples tab of the Criteria builder and in the Catalog of weather alerts topic. Review the weather alerts that are applicable to each region and the weather alerts that are available globally.

An administrator at each customer site activates weather alerts as required.

Alert notifications

To send a notification for a weather alert, you must configure an alert rule. In the rule, you can configure a notification for a single weather alert, such as NWS_FLOOD_WARNING, by using a sample criteria in the builder. You can configure a notification for a set of alerts, such as winter_weather_alerts, by using a custom criteria in the criteria builder. Notifications can be sent as a JSON payload to an HTTP endpoint or as an email to contacts. You can also send notifications to the Action center. Weather alerts that meet the criteria are displayed in an Alerts table in the Action center. You can configure the rule to include one or more notification methods.

Criteria

You can choose between two types of criteria, deepening on your needs:

Sample criterias are available in your account for you to use under the Sample tab of the Criteria builder. Each sample criteria corresponds to a single specific weather alert.
You can also define custom criteria in your account so that you can group multiple sample criterias. Therefore, a custom criteria can correspond to a single weather alert or multiple weather alerts.

For example, you can create a custom criteria definition that includes all winter weather alerts and name it winter_weather_alerts. You can also include custom criteria into another custom criteria to group weather alerts as required. In the API, the criteria definitions are referred to as savedFilters

When you create a criteria definition, you can choose a language override for the message that is sent to contacts. The following languages are supported:

English (default)
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Portuguese (Brazilian)
Spanish

Alert rules

The alert rule connects the notification method to a criteria definition. When an alert rule is activated, notifications are sent for the weather alerts that meet the criteria for the rule. Notifications are sent to HTTP endpoints, to contacts who are subscribed to the criteria through email, and to the Action center. You can configure the rule to include one or more notification methods from endpoint, email, and action center.

Message templates

You can customize the format and the content of the email message for each alert rule. You can use the Message builder to customize the default template or define your own message content.

Assets

An asset represents a location, such as the head office, that is defined by geographic coordinates. Two types of assets are supported:

Static: Assets such as office locations that have location coordinates that don’t change often.
Mobile projected: Moving assets, such as moving trucks, that have location coordinates that change continuously.

The Asset type field in the Asset object can contain either one of these values, depending on the use cases that are described in the following paragraphs.

Static assets are used as a point for matching against weather conditions. For mobile projected assets, a semicircle of 15-mile radius is drawn in the direction an asset is moving, and the area under the semicircle is matched against weather conditions. When you add a mobile projected asset for the first time, the direction the asset is moving is not known, so a full circle of 15-mile radius is drawn for matching against weather conditions. The radius of 15 miles is fixed and cannot be customized, because increasing the radius adds processing complexity for location matching against incoming weather conditions.

Support for the mobile projected asset type is disabled in all accounts by default. Contact IBM to enable support for the mobile projected asset type. When the support is disabled, you can still create mobile projected assets, but these assets are not processed for alerts.

Contacts

A contact is defined by a given name, surname, and email address. Contacts are associated with asset locations. An asset does not have to be associated with a contact, but can be associated with multiple contacts.

Locations

If you plan to provide more details about the asset location, such as the street address, you can use the Location object. You do not need to enter geographic coordinates in the Location object because the coordinates are part of the Asset object. An asset must be associated with a Location object. The address that you enter in the Location object is not validated by comparing to the coordinates of the associated asset. For alert processing, only geographic coordinates are considered.

Alert subscriptions

To receive alerts for the active rules with any custom criteria, assets or contacts must subscribe to those criteria. You can create two types of subscriptions:

Asset endpoint subscriptions: Asset endpoint subscriptions bind specific assets to specific custom criteria definitions for endpoint alerting. For example, if an asset subscribes to winter_weather_alerts criteria, it only gets notified for weather alerts within winter_weather_alerts criteria to the endpoint.
Contact alert subscriptions: Contact alert subscriptions bind specific contacts to specific custom criteria definitions for email alerting. For example, if the contact called Jane subscribes to all winter_weather_alerts, Jane gets notified for only weather alerts within winter_weather_alerts criteria through emails for all the assets that Jane is associated with.

Assets and contacts that do not subscribe to any criterias receive alerts for any active rules that you created using sample criterias from the Sample tab of the Criteria builder.