How to Set Up User Alerts

About User Alerts

The User Alerts features gives users the ability to get notified as a result of different triggers from SmartHub features such as:

  • Logging notifications
  • Backend failures 

How to Configure Alerts

Alert functionality requires an SMTP server to be configured in the SmartHub Admin site to enable SmartHub to send e-mails to users and administrators.

The alert configuration prompts you for the following:

  • SMTP Server Address and Port
    • Provided values are the default values for the O365 Exchange email server
  • Credentials to SMTP Server
    • The credentials are encrypted and stored in the Federator configuration XML file

User Alerts

Users can choose to receive any of the following alerts:

Immediate Alerts

These are sent to the Administrator directly without “batching” since they are considered critical – for example, if Elastic is unreachable for more than 5 minutes.

  • When a saved query results changed (requires user subscription)
  • When best bets results changed (if they subscribed to it)

Instant Alerts

  • Receive notifications (email and/or in-app) vs digest only
    • With instant alerts you receive an email every time changes are detected
    • With digest-only you receive an email every X time with the changes for all your subscriptions
  • Users:
    • Cannot choose the email address for security reasons (spam risk).
    • Can name their subscription
      • Example: “My cases” or “Documents about SmartHub”
    • Can choose how often they want to get the notifications from a list of administrator-defined values:
      • Example:
        • Daily at 8 AM
        • Daily at 5 PM
        • Every Friday at 5 PM
        • Every Monday at 8 AM
        • Advanced: User can choose “daily at what time” and “weekly in which days”. Cron expressions not supported here.

Sending Instant Alerts

  • When changes are detected for a subscription and the subscription has instant alerts enabled, the changes are sent to the user using an HTML template.
  • If the subscription also has “Digest” enabled:
    • Items are not marked as processed so that they can be re-sent during the digest flow
  • If only immediate alerts are enabled:
    • Items are marked as processed so as to not be sent again
    • Items are moved to the archive – see "Gathering user alerts data"

Sending Digest Email to Users

SmartHub has a scheduled digest task. Note the following:

  • The task runs every 30 mins.
  • Every time the task runs, it checks for digest emails set to be delivered at that time or within the next 30 minutes.
    1. If no emails are set to be delivered:
      1. The task stops
    2. If emails are found set to be delivered:
      1. The task grabs the data to send from disk and sends an email to the user using an HTML template (underscore.js)
      2. The task then marks the items as “processed”

How to Create an Alert

To create an alert, users perform the following steps:

  1. Navigate to your SmartHub site.

  2. Perform a query. 

  3. On the Results page the following is shown:

Subscription Indicator

  • On the left side, expand the Saved Queries category to see a list of saved queries
  • If the user has subscribed to a query, a subscription indicator is displayed next to the query. See the screenshot below.
  • Subscribed queries are shown first, at the top of the list

How to Change or Unsubscribe from a Query

Unsubscribe or change the subscription options from a saved query using the vertical dot icon menu for the saved query:

Change Subscription

Changing the subscription enables users to:

  • Unsubscribe
  • Select if and how often they want to receive digests
  • Choose to receive instant alerts


Subscription Options

How to Subscribe to a New Query

Subscribe to a new query one of two ways:

  • Search bar:
    • Directly from your search bar
  • Query History widget:
    • From the options of a query under the Query History category in left-side navigation
  1. Select "Create alert" from the dot icon menu directly attached to the search query field, and follow the instructions that appear.
    See the graphic below:

Query History Widget

  1. Select the dot icon from a query under "Query History" in the left-side navigation panel.


  2. Enter a query title and select "Notify on document changes."

How to Notify a User of New Results to a Query Suggestion

To subscribe to new results for a query suggestion in the search bar, see below:

  1. When the query suggestions appear, click the bell, encapsulated below:



  2. Choose the notification frequency details: