Zylo Tips: How to Use Automated Alerts

Imagine you have all of your data neatly organized in Zylo, but you still find yourself either babysitting processes or setting undue burdens and expectations on your business leaders. Out of fear of missing something, you’re over notifying everyone. In reality, you just need to identify risks without the noise. 

That’s where Zylo’s Automated Alerts comes in.

What Is Automated Alerts?

Automated Alerts uses automation to notify stakeholders to take specific actions across your inventory, licenses, and renewals. It lets you set and forget, scaling alerts across all of your applications so you can focus on execution.

Let’s examine a few examples of when you might use an Automated Alert. 

1. Notify security of a newly added application with a low risk score. 
2. Let someone in IT know that an application they own is about to run out of licenses and suggest a workflow to reclaim inactive users. 
3. Provide app owners all the details they need about an upcoming renewal.

Old Alerts vs Automated Alerts

How do the new Automated Alerts compare to the old alerts inside of Zylo? There are a few key differences.

Alert Configuration

Many of the old alerts had to be configured on an application by application basis. This made it a real pain when you wanted to set up an alert across all apps, such as an alert for expense transactions at a certain spend threshold. With Automated Alerts, you’re able to configure logic that triggers on the types of payments that you care about across every single application – in one fell swoop. 

Email Setup

Before, there was very little configuration in terms of what content and context was sent in the emails to stakeholders. Now, you have fully customizable templates. You can change the branding, layout, and the content inside the email. For example, you can point to existing policies or include other information about your applications that you want your users to see. 

Alert Timing

In the past, because there were multiple ways to configure alerts, either at the app or global level, it was difficult to understand what was going out and when. With Automated Alerts, all of your alerts are centralized in one place. Now, you can easily see what is being sent out to who and when. 

In addition to this visibility, you now have control of when alerts go out. With the old alerts, it was not possible to configure time zones. It would be really annoying if you’re in Australia getting an alert at 4:00 AM or if you’re in Europe getting an alert right in the middle of dinnertime. Now you can schedule alerts based on your account’s time zone, as well as your recipients’ time zones.

How to Get Started Using Automated Alerts

Automated Alerts live in the Automate tab in Zylo. If you click in, you can see all of the automated alerts as well as reports, which we’ll cover in another video, all in one place. 

Here you will find what we call Zylo Plays. These plays are based on common use cases we’ve seen with our customers to give you a quick starting point. 

So, how do you use Alerts? Let’s walk through all the elements of setting up an alert. We’ll use  “individual contract renewal alert” as an example.

The Anatomy of an Alert

To start, click into “individual contract renewal alert” and select edit. First, name the alert to something specific and recognizable. Another element to consider is tagging the alert. Because this is a Play, it’s pre-tagged with Zylo Plays and Renewals. You can add additional tags based on how you want to manage and organize your alerts. 

Start Automation

The first step is to set the timing for your automation. In this case, you can see that it is running on a daily basis at 11:00 AM. There’s quite a bit of configuration in terms of if you want it to be the first Tuesday of the month or the first week of the month – or what have you. Check out the Knowledge Base for more detail. 

Get Data

The Get Data step is where you set up the business logic to pull the right data into this alert. In the below example, you can see that this is for app renewals with the following statuses, with the next contract end date being in 90 days. For any application that, at that time, is renewing in 90 days, you or your stakeholders will get an alert. 

Send Email

Next up is the email send option. While this is a Play, you can still edit and customize the email. To do that, click edit. Below are a few ways you can tailor the email:

• Send to a dynamic list of recipients so you don’t have to specify who the email alerts are going to. 
• Dynamically send alerts to app owners, business owners, or IT owners. 
• Bring in context about the application that’s renewing into the subject line. 
• Customize the look of the email to match your brand.
• Add dynamic fields within the body of your email based on what application is being renewed.
• Choose not to send an alert if there are no applications renewing in 90 days.

Now, the power of this is an alert will be sent for each individual renewal, creating a thread for every app that’s coming up for renewal. 

Set Up Automated Alerts to Help Operationalize SaaS Management

If you’re excited to learn more, jump into the Knowledge Base or reach out to your CSM for some help. And also check out those Zylo Plays. They’re really great resources to get up and running very quickly. In our next video series, we’re going to talk about Automated Reports and how you can send more than single record data and distribute reports and dashboards out to your stakeholders.