Measuring Business Impact

Setting an Impact Value for specific measures enables you to gauge the business impact (in monetary terms) of an anomaly. Once the Impact Value is set, the next alert you will get from Anodot (via email) will include details of the business impact of the anomaly.

 

This article includes:

Defining the Impact Value

The following procedure describes the steps required to set an Impact Value.

  1. Navigate to Integrations > Sources.
  2. From the list of displayed Data Sources, locate the relevant Data Stream or Data Pipeline for which you want to set an Impact Value.
  3. Click on the Data Stream or Data Pipeline name to display the stream/pipeline settings and other information.
  4. Click the Impact tab, as shown below, to set the Impact Value for the stream/pipeline measures.

    BusinessImpact2.png
  5. Click count (this option will change according to the stream/pipeline measure) or Set Value to set the Impact Value.

    BusinessImpact3.png
  6. Define the following:
      • Enter a monetary value in the Value box. Alternatively, you can drag the slider bar to define the relevant value. You can also enter a value in the Value box that is a fraction of the available slider bar values; for example, if you know that the value of each visitor to your website is worth $0.01, enter 0.01. 
        Note: The Impact Value is generated according to the number of measures Anodot finds. For example, if you define the Impact Value as $0.01 per website visitor and your website has 1000 visitors, the monetary (business) impact will be 1000 x $0.01, in other words, $10.
      • Select the relevant currency from the dropdown list.
      • In the Direction Behavior section, you can define whether spikes and drops are good, bad, or neither.  
  7. Click Set Impact Value. The next alert you will get from Anodot will include details of the business impact of the anomaly (see the following section). The alerts for this stream that are displayed on the Alerts Console page will also indicate the value of the business impact.

Editing the Impact Value from the Alert Console

You can edit the Impact Value of the alerts generated by the relevant stream/pipeline in the Alert Console, as described in the following steps:

  1. From the Navigation Panel, click Alert Console.
  2. In the displayed list of alerts, locate an alert from the relevant stream.
  3. Click the More Info icon in the far right column, and select Edit Impact.
    impact-edit.png
  4. In the displayed Impact dialog, define the relevant value (refer to Steps 6 and 7 in Defining the Impact Value for further details).

    edit-impact-dialog.png

Receiving notification of the Business Impact

There are two scenarios for receiving email notifications of the Business Impact:

  • After setting your Impact Value (see above), subsequent email alerts received from Anodot will also include a highlighted Impact section, as shown below.

    BusinessImpact1-edit.png 

Things you need to know about Business Impact

This section details additional things you need to know about Business Impact, including:

The conditions required for including Business Impact in an alert

In order for the impact to be defined for an alert it should meet both of the following conditions:

  • All metrics in the alert should originate from the same schema (meaning the same stream/pipeline).

  • All metrics in the alert should have the same ‘what (measure)’.

If these conditions are not met, the Impact information will not be included in the alert trigger.

How to use functions and still receive impact information in alerts

There is a limited number of functions (see the list below) that can be applied to metrics and still trigger Business Impact information in alerts. Other functions ignore the impact definitions and impact information is not triggered.

The current functions you can use and still receive impact information:

  • Absolute
  • Add Constant
  • Offset
  • Average Series
  • Max Series
  • Min Series
  • Subtract Series
  • Sum Series
  • Group By
  • Multiply Series
  • Pow
  • Scale