Overview

Data monitors provide a simple way to monitor and provide notifications when data changes within a database.  Monitors can be used to monitor data integrity/issues in production (data scenarios that shouldn't exist, range checking, increase/decrease in ETL quantities, simply when column/row values change (no need to install table triggers), etc. or could be used a simple QA unit/integration test system prior to deploying code to production.


Setting up a monitor requires only three steps: write a query for the tables/data you want to monitor, choose a trigger type (more on this later), and define a schedule for when you want it to run.  One a change is detected, based on the trigger type, an email notification can be sent.


Triggers

Triggers determine which method QuickReportz uses to monitor the data.  Several types of triggers exist within the system  as described below.


  • Row Count trigger
    • Triggers based on number of rows
  • Columnar Thresholds trigger
    • Triggers of column values exceed a specified range
  • Static Snapshot Variance trigger
    • A snapshot for all columns and rows of the monitor query are taken and then used as a base comparison against future executions of the monitor.  If a future execution of the monitor returns results that vary from the base snapshot the monitor will trigger and the differences will be shown.
  • Static Snapshot Columnar Variance Trigger
    • Similar to the trigger described above except that you can configure which columns of your query you want to monitor vs. all columns.  This makes it possible to have the entire row of data included in the email notification or shown within the page but only monitor the value of a single column


Scheduling and Notifications

Monitors can be optionally scheduled to run at a specific time of the day or on any regular interval as shown below.



Notifications can be sent when a monitor passes or is triggered.  Typically sending notifications on success is not enabled but is sometimes useful when a set of users want reassurance that a test being performed.  Multiple email addresses can be specified using a semi-colon delimiter