Alerts

Alerts let you describe, in plain English, a condition you want Celiq to watch. Orion reads your sentence, matches it to a governed reveal and metric, and turns it into a structured check. Once a day Celiq re-runs that reveal, compares the value to your threshold, and — if the condition is met — raises the alert: it adds an item to your Action Center and, if you've pointed it at Slack, sends a message there too.

Overview

A natural-language alert is built from one sentence. You type the condition the way you'd say it to a colleague, Celiq parses it with Orion, and you confirm the structured result before anything is saved. From then on the alert runs unattended on a daily schedule.

Every alert resolves to four things:

• Metric — the human-readable measure you care about (e.g. CAC, Return rate).
• Reveal — the governed reveal that backs the metric. Alert values come from reveals only, never raw SQL.
• Condition — one of exceeds, drops_below, or changes_by.
• Threshold — the number to compare against, with a unit (dollars, percent, count, or ratio).

Because evaluation runs through your governed reveal, an alert always uses your canonical metric definition and respects your row- and column-level security — it can't fire on an approximation, and a restricted owner's alert can't broadcast a value computed over rows they aren't allowed to see.

When to use it

Use an alert when you want a metric watched continuously and don't want to remember to look:

• "Tell me if customer acquisition cost climbs past my target."
• "Let me know the day return rate slips below an acceptable level."
• "Ping me if revenue swings by more than 15% week over week."

If instead you want Celiq to surface unexpected movements you didn't think to watch for — spikes and dips it detects on its own — that's a different feature. See Signals.

Alerts vs Signals

Set an Alert when you already know the line you care about. Watch Signals when you want Celiq to find the surprises for you.

Concepts

Getting started

Prerequisites:

• A governed reveal that exposes the metric you want to watch. If the metric has no reveal, build one in Forge first.
• A workspace Anthropic API key so Orion can parse your sentence. If none is configured, parsing returns a hint to add one in Lumen → AI settings.
• A role of Tracer or above (Tracer, Weaver, Luminary).

To open the Alerts page, click the Alerts pill in the navigation — the bell-plus icon, distinct from the Action Center. The page lists every alert in your workspace with an Active Alerts (N) count, and a Create Alert button to add one.

Step-by-step

There are two ways to start: from scratch on the Alerts page, or directly from an Orion answer that already has the metric in context. Both open the same Set an Alert drawer.

Examples

Phrases you can type, and how they map to a condition:

Once parsed and created, the alert is stored as a structured config. A representative shape:

{
  "metric_name": "CAC",
  "reveal_name": "cac",
  "domain_name": "marketing",
  "condition": "exceeds",
  "threshold_value": 50,
  "threshold_unit": "dollars",
  "check_schedule": "daily",
  "confidence": "high"
}

When the daily check finds the condition met, you'll see an Action Center entry titled like CAC exceeds $50 with the line Current value is $62. Triggered alert: "notify me when CAC exceeds $50". If the alert is pointed at Slack, the same trigger posts a message to your chosen channel or DM.

Best practices

• Threshold first, then watch. Set the line where it genuinely matters to you — an alert that fires every day is noise.
• Test now after creating. A quick test confirms the alert is wired to the metric you intended and shows where the value sits today.
• Use changes_by for volatility. When the absolute level matters less than the swing (e.g. week-over-week revenue), changes_by reads the magnitude of movement rather than a fixed level.
• Govern the metric once. Because alerts run on reveals, defining a metric well in Forge benefits alerts, Orion, and dashboards all at once.
• Pause instead of delete when you only want a temporary break — a paused alert keeps its history and can be resumed.

Tips

Common mistakes

Troubleshooting

Related pages

• Signals
• Notifications
• Forge
• Reveals