About Alert Rules actions and notification recipients – Knowledge Base

An Alert Rule's Actions decide how people and systems are notified when an alert is triggered. A rule needs at least one action to notify people, and any combination of them can be selected.

Every triggered alert is always in the app's Alerts list, whether or not any action is configured. Actions control who is notified — not whether the alert is listed in a Kio App.

Recipient alert notification methods

Emails: Sends an email that includes the action's Subject, then the alert details followed by the action's Message.
Text Messages: Sends a text message that includes the alert details followed by the action's Message. A short Message is better — a long text may be split by the recipient's carrier.
Phone calls: Places an automated call that identifies itself as a Kontakt.io notification, then announces the alert details followed by the action's Message. The call repeats, so a missed first few seconds does not lose the alert. A Message of one or two sentences works best — anything longer is hard to follow when spoken. Phone calls has two settings the other methods do not:
- Also send as Text Message: Sends a text message as well as placing the call, to the same recipients. Use it when the call may go to voicemail and the recipient needs something they can read afterwards. This is separate from the Text Messages action: it reuses the Phone calls recipients, not the ones set there.
- Acknowledgment: Whether the alert can be acknowledged from the call itself. Not enabled makes the call informational, leaving the alert unacknowledged until someone acts on it in the app or from an email or text notification. On answer treats answering as acknowledgment. On keypad button 1 press ends the call by asking the recipient to press that key, which is the option to choose when answering alone is not proof that someone is acting on the alert — a call can be answered by voicemail or by a phone in a pocket.
Acknowledging records who is responding, so it is worth setting deliberately rather than leaving at the default. A phone call reaches only recipients who have a phone number; selected users without one are not called, and no error is shown.
Webhooks: Sends the alert to a third-party system as structured data for that system to process. Webhooks are created and configured in Company Settings and then assigned in an Alert Rule. Webhooks are commonly managed by an IT or an integration team, and then assigned to a rule.

Three ways to add recipients

Each notification action accepts recipients in three ways, and they can be combined in the same action:

Recipients: Add individual email addresses or phone numbers directly, pressing Enter after each one. Use this for anyone without a Kio Cloud user profile, such as an on-call vendor or an answering service.
Users: Select people by name from the Kio Cloud users in the account. Their contact details come from their user profile, so a change to a profile applies to every rule they are included in.
User groups: Select a Group (managed from the Kio Cloud User app) and every member (user) in it is notified. As users are added or removed from a Group, the changes are automatically applied to the rule — no need to edit the rule.

Selecting Users or User groups is the more maintainable choice – each user profile's contact details live in one place, and rules do not need editing when user profile details change. Adding recipients directly remains the only way to notify someone who is not a Kio Cloud user.

Users and User groups are both maintained in the Users app. Selecting them in an Alert Rule does not create or change them:

Users: Each person's email address and phone number come from their user profile, in Users > User Management.
User groups: Group membership is managed in Users > Groups. Adding or removing a member (user) from a group is automatically updated in every rule that group is part of.

From an Alert Rule's action, selecting Manage opens the Users app in a new tab. Only users assigned to the User Management Administrator role have access to view, create, and manage user profiles and groups, so if a required person is missing — or a group needs a new member — ask a User Management Administrator rather than working around it with a directly added address.

As recipients are selected, a summary shows who will actually be notified. Use it to confirm the rule reaches the intended people before saving.

Email and text notifications

Emails and text messages are not only what is provided in the subject and message. Each one combines three parts, in this order:

Alert details the rule automatically generates. The alert name, what triggered it, and where — generated from the alert itself, so recipients are provided the alert details.
The Subject and Message. Both are free-form text and are set on the action, not once for the rule, so each notification method can carry its own wording. The message (optional) is commonly used for additional instructions the alert details cannot supply, such as which procedure to follow.
A link to respond. Recipients can acknowledge or resolve the alert from the notification, without signing in to the app first. The system automatically logs each user action in the alert's Activity Timeline.

Because an alert notification automatically includes the alert details (name, trigger, and location) a Message works best as an instruction rather than a restatement of the alert. A Message belongs to the action it is set on — Emails, Text Messages and Phone calls each take their own — and the same text is sent for every alert that rule triggers — it has to hold true for everything the rule covers, which rules out naming a specific staff member, location, or incident.

Things to know

A user selected twice is notified once. If someone is selected under Users and belongs to a selected User group, they receive one notification, not two.
An empty group notifies no one. A group with no members is valid to select but reaches nobody, so the rule can look complete while notifying fewer people than intended.
A user with no phone number cannot be reached by phone. An email address is required for every Kio Cloud user, so email always reaches its recipients. A phone number is optional. The recipient list indicates if anyone has no phone number, which is worth checking on any rule that depends on reaching someone urgently. To add a missing phone number, see Add a user.

User groups are not Staff Groups

Both terms appear in the Alert Rule wizard, and they do opposite jobs:

Staff Groups determine which staff the rule monitors — whose badge press activates an alert. They are set on the Applies To step and are managed in Staff Safe.
User groups determine who is notified when that alert is activated. They are set here on the Actions step and are managed in the Kio Cloud Users app.

A rule commonly uses both: a Staff Group of the people being protected, and a User group of the responders who are notified. The same people are rarely in both.

Reminders

Reminders are also set on the Actions step. A reminder re-notifies the same recipients — either once or repeating on a schedule — while an alert stays Not Acknowledged or Not Resolved, so an alert is not missed because the first notification was.

Alert Severity is set on the General setting in an Alert Rule. When an alert has a severity of Critical, Staff Safe also activates an in-app banner and plays an audible alert notification for signed-in users, in addition to any notification methods configured on the rule.

These critical-alert notifications are on for everyone who can see alerts and cannot be turned off by the people who respond to them. Only the Staff Safe Administrator role can turn them off, and only for their own user profile in the browser they are using. The option exists for administrators, who are commonly not the alert responders and so do not need the alerts — not as a general setting for anyone who finds them intrusive.

The control is not in Settings. It is the notification icon in the top-right header, which opens a panel titled Critical alert notifications with a toggle for each app that supports them.

Note: The Simple View always shows and plays critical-alert notifications, regardless of that setting, because it is the responder view. Because the setting applies to one person in one browser, a user who is not receiving critical-alert sound in the standard views cannot be fixed by someone else changing a setting for them.

Where notifications come from

For the exact alert details Staff Safe generates, with examples, see Reference: What a Staff Safe alert notification includes.

To create a rule and set its actions, see Create an Alert Rule.