Alerts Overview
Get an email or Slack message when a metric crosses a threshold, changes sharply, or stops arriving.
An alert watches a table that refreshes, such as daily sessions from Google Analytics or orders from your database, and notifies you when a condition is met. Better Analyst checks each completed day, week, or month and sends a message when the metric:
- Rises above or falls below a threshold
- Changes by a percentage or an amount compared with the previous period
- Has no data for the period
Before you save, the alert shows how often it would have fired over the last 30, 60, and 90 days, so you can tune the threshold before it reaches anyone's inbox.
Alerts are deterministic: the same rule runs the same way on every check. No AI model decides whether an alert fires.
Where to Find Alerts
- Alerts in the sidebar lists every alert in the current workspace with its status, how often it checks, and when it last fired. Select New alert to start one.
- Create alert mode in chat. Switch the chat composer to Create alert, ask for the data you want to watch, then select Create alert above the composer to choose a table.
- A Data Flow page. Open a saved flow and select Add alert to watch the table the flow delivers. The alert checks each time the flow runs.
See Create an alert for each path.
What an Alert Watches
An alert needs data that Better Analyst can pull again, so an alert chat needs a connected data source or a public dataset. Uploaded files are fixed snapshots and can't be watched.
The table needs a date column. If the table you pick doesn't have one, the alert setup offers to have the chat rebuild it as a dated table.
Plan Availability
| Plan | Active alerts | Checks | Preview history |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Not included | — | Up to 90 days |
| Starter | 1 | Weekly | Up to 90 days |
| Max | 5 | Daily | Up to 90 days |
| Business | 25 | Daily | Up to 90 days |
On Free you can set up an alert and see its full 30, 60 and 90-day preview, but saving it asks you to upgrade. Paused alerts don't count toward the limit.
Emailing teammates and posting to Slack need a team workspace. See Delivery.
Alerts vs. Data Flows
| Alerts | Data Flows |
|---|---|
| Watch one metric and notify you when it meets a condition | Deliver a whole refreshed table to Google Sheets or a database |
| Send an email or Slack message | Write rows to a destination |
| Check once a day, or after each run of a Data Flow | Run on demand or on a schedule |
Use both together: a Data Flow keeps a table current, and an alert on that flow tells you when something in it changes.