Regular alerts are custom alerts that are automatically sent via email. The content of the alerts is optional, e.g. they can be alerts about upcoming expiration of software licenses, upcoming end of warranty period of certain devices, etc.

Periodic alerts can be managed by members of the Administrators group in Administration - Periodic alerts.

The basis of each alert definition is a single SQL script that returns a table with message parameters and sent data. The data is always part of the email text and can optionally be attached as a CSV file.

SQL script

TheSQL script of the created alert is executed periodically according to the set retry period.

The script return table must contain the following mandatory columns:

Column	Description
From	The sender of the message, e.g. Alvao DontReply <do-not-reply@domain.com>. A NULL value means that the notification is sent from the set message sender of the Alvao system. A user account, that is used to send messages through the SMTP server must have permission to send messages on behalf of that sender.
To	A list of message recipients separated by semicolons, e.g. "user1@domain.com; user2@domain.com".
Cc	List of recipients of a copy of the message
Bcc	Hidden message copy recipient list
Subject	Message subject
Text	Message text. The text may use html tags to format the text.

The return table is first grouped by message parameters (mandatory columns). The resulting list represents individual sent emails. The text of each email then contains a data table containing the values from the other columns of the table from all rows with the given values of the mandatory items.

Note:

If an email contains more than 50 recipients in any field (recipient, copy, hidden copy), it is sent in batches of up to 50 recipients per field.

Note:

The notification is only sent when the SQL script returns some rows. If the entity list is empty, and the user still wants to be notified, the script must be written so that it always returns some rows.

Tip:

Alerts can optionally be evaluated over an analytics database instead of a production database. This is especially recommended for alerts that take a long time (tens of seconds or more) to execute the SQL script.

Caution:

Each periodic alert is triggered in a transaction with an isolation level of ReadUncommited. Therefore, in extreme cases, the script may work with data that a user is currently editing.

Problem solving

If some notifications are not being sent as they should, check the following points:

In the Administration - Periodic alerts table, select the alert in question. If an error occurred the last time it was evaluated, you will see the text of the error message in the preview on the right.
In SQL Server Management Studio, run the SQL script manually and check that it returns some data and that it returns all the required columns.
Check the messaging settings.

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