Using Broadcasts to send out a message, notification, or alert is a great way to drive targeted action. Messages don’t need to be complex. Often, just telling somebody that something has happened - or is about to happen - has value.

This is especially true where it's about something related to but outside their domain. For example, letting an application owner know a project impacting his application has now been approved, or letting a process owner know there’s a problem with an upstream process.

A simple but important feature of Broadcasts is the ability to include URLs in the message body. It means you can use the message to distribute links to other Ardoq assets like Presentations, or to direct your audience to other applications or information resources.

Let’s start by building a simple threshold alert. We’ll set up a filter condition that will detect when a threshold has been exceeded and use it to trigger a message.

We want to send this message to very-specific stakeholders, so we’re going to use Ardoq’s most advanced audience-targeting functionality: A Gremlin path query. This enables us to send the message to people who are only indirectly connected to the component that triggers the alert.

Specifically, the alert will notify multiple application owners that there’s a data quality issue with an application. It will send the alert to application owners whose applications are downstream from an application that provides data to their applications.

It will be triggered when a count of data quality issues goes above a given threshold. This data may be manually logged, calculated, or populated via Ardoq’s API.

The query will follow an outgoing reference type called ‘Flows To’ downstream with up to three degrees of separation from the starting component, picking up the application owners as it goes.

Add Filter Rules

Manage Landing Page

Subject

Alert: One or more applications have exceeded data quality threshold

Body

Hi {audienceName},

The following applications have exceeded their data quality issue thresholds and this may impact your own applications’ data quality:

For more information, go to our data quality resources page or see this Ardoq presentation.

Run a repeating broadcast

Reminder

This is another alert similar to the data quality Broadcast above. In this case, we’re using relative dates to create a milestone alert that will inform stakeholders when a key date is approaching.

Specifically, we’re looking for Technology Services which are approaching the end of their mainstream support periods (e.g. a version of SQL Server will soon be out of support). We’ll then notify the Owners of Applications which run on that Technology Service.

Once again, it uses a Gremlin path query to build the audience, allowing stakeholders who will be impacted by the risk but who are only indirectly connected to the focus component to be notified.

It’s worth noting the scheduling logic: We want to pick up all the Technology Services whose End of Mainstream Support Date is in less than six months.

Because we don’t want to endlessly rebroadcast the same Technology Services that were on the last Broadcast, we also include a condition that will filter out previously-Broadcast Technology Services. Of course, you can drop this condition if you want to keep reminding people that they need to take action!

Add Filter Rules

Manage Landing Page

Subject

Alert: One or more technologies will soon be out of support

Body

Hi {audienceName},

The following technologies your applications use are approaching their end-of-support dates. This may pose a risk to your application(s) ongoing operations.

For more details of the impacts, see this Ardoq presentation. To understand how to update your application, contact technical support on this email address.

Run a repeating broadcast

Reminder

We'll give another example of a milestone alert. In this case, we have a pipeline project whose impacts have been mapped to a variety of other components - applications, business processes, departments, locations, etc.

Now we want to notify all the owners of those impacted components that the project has been approved. In this case, we’re not specifying which type of component sits between the Project and the Person - we’ll include anything impacted by the project which has an owner.

Add Filter Rules

Manage Landing Page

Subject

Alert: A project impacting you has been approved

Body

Hi {audienceName},

The following projects impacting your domain have been approved this week and will now go into execution:

Run a repeating broadcast

Reminder

One more milestone alert - this time to let stakeholders know a contract is coming up for renewal in the next 3-4 months. The difference here is that we’ll use a combination of audience types to notify two sets of people, each with different relationships to the contract.

First, we want to let the Procurement Team know. We’ll use a Predefined Graph Query to notify the Procurement specialist responsible for the contract.

We also want to let the enterprise architect know, too. However, she isn’t directly related to the contract: She oversees the Web Portal domain which groups together a number of applications, and one of those is the one covered by the contract up for renewal.

So here we’ll use both direct and indirect relationships in the same Broadcast to reach these two different audiences.

Add Filter Rules

Manage Landing Page

Subject

Alert: Contracts in your domain are coming up for renewal

Body

Hi {audienceName},

The following contracts related to your domain will be coming up for renewal in the next four months or less:

Run a repeating broadcast

Reminder

Hope this guide helps in getting Broadcasts messages out to the right people at the right time...with the right message, of course. If not, be sure to reach out, and we'll guide you through it.