The idea behind "sentinels" came from our work on tripwire — specifically the “push” aspect where you get a notice from tripwire when something triggers your alerts. We thought it might be a good idea to create a global system inside insight that alerts you when an event of interest happens. From my experience working for JDIS Group, there's a tendency to fail to notice critical events such as a payment that I need to distribute to other parties involved in the job. I need to know when it comes in, so I can ask the Accounts Receivable staff, but when everyone's busy and overloaded, you might imagine that things sometimes get overlooked. This is a system that overcomes that specific problem without tasking any staff members.

Sentinels works by leveraging another sub-system within insight called “pulse”.¹ Pulse runs every time any event is triggered within insight from a change in a job ticket to an item being moved from one shelf to another. At the time this blog post was written, there were more than 690 pulse events in the system.

We created an initial set of available sentries by asking users what events they need to keep track of.² When we designed sentinels, we wanted the following criteria:

• The sentinel should be able to alert us by way of the timeline, a mobile text, or both.
• The sentinel should be able to track specific items such as updates on a specific inventory item, or general events like every time someone opens a billable job.
• The sentinel should be easy to manage, to set a fixed expiraton if needed, and to be accessible from any page.

Sentinels are managed from the “quick menu” which opens as an overlay on any page.

Setting up a new sentinel is very easy using +new. In the most general case, we don't target a specific item like a job, so that control is only shown when relevant.

You can also edit a sentinel by clicking on it in the list. Note in the picture below that we have this sentinel watching one particular job (13545). You can change things like expiration or target here — or you can delete it immediately.³

Sentinel reports are always available from the timeline. The following screenshot shows three of the five sentinels from figure 1 above have reported events. Depending on the user's alert settings, they received a timeline alert and/or SMS text at the time this event happened.

We plan to expand the sentinels concept through a dialog with our users. This feature is now released as today (v16.120) and accessible to all pulse-enabled users.