Monthly Archives: December 2011

Conditional alerts in MicroStrategy…. that to not using Narrowcast Server


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MicroStrategy

Last week, one of our clients had hugh increase in the sales numbers. Everyone in the BI team gets reports regarding data; data load status, etc as soon as it is over. Local team was a bit amused and prima facia client ath “finally Christmas sale has picked up”. Wow.. but when ETL team looked closely, we came to know that was issue with data provided by mainframe team. Scheduler uploaded two copies of the files in the folder under which all files are loaded blindly into data warehouse. Rarely faced any issue like double file.

 

I asked my colleague, who is a Narrowcast champ, why can’t we have few schedules/alters for data load errors. He told me that they were already having several emails regarding data load status. Personally, it is a bad idea to receive data load status report on daily basis, as chance of an error is next to nil and you may forget to read automated status report. (Though he manages the status religiously and had instantly pointed out to ETL team regarding this issue that day, I was looking for conditional alerts. My friend told me that conditional alerts are only possible using FF SQL reports, also we need to use Windows scheduler to activate the alerts and need to compare if we require it to send only if some condition is met. Pretty messy and lengthy in Narrowcast server.

 

Finally, I found a very easy solution using Web subscriptions. Well….. it is possible to create an email subscription which will be executed when a certain conditional is satisfied. To create a conditional email subscription, use following steps.

1. Create reports with base metric and at least one threshold metric.

2. Execute the report.

3. From Right mouse click menu on any metric, select Alerts.

4. Alert editor (Similar to filter editor) opens up. You can specify the criteria.

5. Under Delivery settings, specify Schedule, email address, delivery format and any custom message.

6. Bonus: If you want another report to be sent if this condition is satisfied, you can specify the report name using “Send different report or document”.

MicroStrategy India is so lame


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MicroStrategy Inc

I know that MicroStrategy, Inc is very much pissed off by me not handing over the .IN and .CO.IN domains, but they have been very nice confirming the registration for events held. I really liked it. But looks like recent bash of speaker of event held on did not go too well with them. I had applied for MicroStrategy event on Mobile BI (to be held on 11th Nov on) and Enterprise BI (to be held on 9th Dec) on 14th Oct. While event to be held on Mobile BI was postponed and eventually cancelled, I was expecting that I would get confirmed invite for Mobile BI event in Nov. Events get cancelled due to not getting good industry speakers or good number of presence by decision maker (who decides on BI purchases). I was shocked when I received a application denial for Mobile BI. Receiving a reminder about denial was even bigger shock. Well, I though MicroStrategy must have been able to merge the vents and find good number of guys, so application rejection was some what acceptable. But, I felt something was a miss when even this event was postponed by a week. Did they fail to get speaker for such an event even after 3 months. Highly unlikely! but event seat not filled, possible. Still I was denied entry for this event.

But I was hoping that I would get the invite for Enterprise BI event for sure. After all I had applied almost 2 months in advance. But my joy was short lived when I received another email on 24th Nov itself regarding event being oversubscrbed and not able to accommodate me.I just checked with my friends with ex-employer regarding going for this events. They were simply unaware about this event. I didn’t inform my friends regarding them about so called over subscription. To my biggest surprise, they got (total 5 person) got confirmed invites for Enterprise BI event, even after having applied after me getting an over subscription notice. I some how doubt that this event was really postponed. Their (friend working in ex-employer) only fault was that they knew me.

I really don’t know why are they acting like a puss. Not to forget they just revoked access to MicroStrategy download site for my official id and blog id on the pretext of “not having a support agreement in place”. Really don’t know how far they will go.