Your MetricsWatch alert emails now show a chart

A MetricsWatch alert email tells you what moved: "Event count decreased by 90.0 (from 187.0 to 97.0)". It did not show you what the metric looked like before it moved. Was that a real break, or a metric that jumps around every day anyway? To find out, you had to sign in and open the alert.

Alert emails now carry a chart of the metric's recent history, right in the email, between the alert details and the buttons. It is the same chart our Slack alerts already show.

What the chart shows

• The alert's recent checks, up to and including the one that fired, drawn as a line: the last 15 for an alert that compares against an earlier period, the last 48 for an alert with a threshold.
• The latest value in large type, and the change the alert itself measured: against the same day last week, the 7-day average, the week before or 30 minutes ago, or how far past your threshold it is.
• For an alert that compares against an earlier period, the stretch from that period to the latest check highlighted, with a dashed line at the value it was compared with.
• The check that fired, marked with a dot at the end of the line.
• Your threshold as a line across the chart, for alerts that fire when a metric goes above or falls below a number.
• The time of the first and last check, in your alert's time zone.

It shows when you open the email

The chart travels inside the email itself rather than as a link to an image somewhere else. Many email apps, Outlook among them, hold linked images back until you click "display images". A chart that is part of the email shows as soon as you open it.

On a phone the chart shrinks with the email. The value and the line stay easy to read; the time labels get small.

Good to know

• The chart is built from checks MetricsWatch has already run. It makes no extra requests to your analytics account.
• An alert with fewer than three checks behind it is sent without a chart.
• If the chart cannot be drawn for any reason, the email still goes out, just without it.
• The email you get when a metric recovers, error emails, SMS and the plain-text version of the email do not include the chart.

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