An alert is basically an exception handling mechanism that notifies user when certain data is out of a pre-defined range. Typically, the user is looking at some KPIs (key performance indicators) that are important to his/her organization. Some example KPIs on which a user may want to set alerts are inventory level, profit margin, sales growth rate, percentage of dropped calls in a mobile network, number of intrusion attempts on a company network, response time on customer support/service center etc..

ERES supports two types of alerts - dashboard alerts and monitoring alerts. Dashboard alerts are evaluated only on currently opened dashboards. They are not triggered when the dashboard is not open. Monitoring alerts are alerts in scheduled objects (reports, charts, maps, dashboards). This is similar to scheduling (described in Section 2.2 - Scheduling & Archiving), except that at the time when alert monitoring task is run, alert conditions are evaluated and the monitoring task actions (i.e. Send email, upload to FTP) are run only if an alert was triggered. If no alerts in the alert monitoring task are triggered, no action is performed.