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Beta: Alerts functionality is in beta and replaces our legacy Routes functionality. Some Routes functionality is no longer available, and you may find issues during the beta period. Please send us your feedback using the Support menu in your dashboard.

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How alerts work

An event is something that happens in your fleet — a SIM reaches a data limit, an IMEI changes, or a device sends a message. Hologram records each event on the Event history page and attaches event tags that identify what happened and which SIM it affected. An alert subscribes to the events you care about and sends a notification — by email or webhook — whenever a matching event occurs. To create an alert, you choose the event types to subscribe to, the SIMs or tags to target, and a notification method. Manage alerts from the Event monitoring section of the main menu under the Alerts tab, or manage them for a single SIM from that SIM’s Alerts tab.

What kinds of alerts does Hologram support?

How do I create an alert to get notified when events occur?

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Accessing data from an event

Your notifications can include data from the event that triggered them — the message a device sent, the SIM’s name, the time Hologram received it, and more.

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Event variables available to use in alerts

You reference event data with variables such as <<decdata>>, <<device.name>>, and <<received>> in your email subject, email body, or webhook payload. What each variable resolves to depends on the kind of event, and JSON payloads have specific quoting rules. See the dedicated guide for the full list of variables, the difference between device-message and system-generated events, and sample payloads for each event type.

Event variables in alerts

Reference event data in your notifications, with quoting rules and sample payloads for each event type.

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Supported notification methods

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Email notifications

Sends an email with the specified subject and body to one or more recipients.
Email notification example

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Parameters

  • Recipients - Comma-separated list of email addresses.
  • Subject - Subject line for the email.
  • Message - Template for the body of the message.

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Webhook notifications

If you need to send messages to an app or service that Hologram doesn’t natively support, you can send notifications using webhooks to send an HTTP POST request to any URL. This is useful for integrating with your own web apps, or services like Zapier, Make, or Slack.
Note: To verify the contents and format of webhooks, it can be useful to send them to an HTTP request inspector such as RequestBin. Use your generated RequestBin URL as the destination URL in the alert, then refresh the RequestBin inspector page after you trigger the event that the alert is subscribed to. The message you receive will let you see the HTTP headers and content of the message that you can expect.
You can also send template variables in the destination URL. This is useful for sending data as URL query string parameters. For example, the URL:
Will send the <<device.id>> and <<data>> variables as query string parameters.

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Webhook configuration

When configuring a webhook notification, you will need to specify the following fields:
  • Destination URL — The URL that receives the POST request. You can include variables in the URL to pass data as query string parameters.
  • Message payload for POST — The body of the request. Use variables to customize the message content. The default value is <<decdata>>, which is the decoded payload of the event (either a string or JSON object). If your payload is JSON, the dashboard validates it (with variables substituted) before saving and offers a Format JSON button to pretty-print it.
  • Headers for POST — Add custom headers as key-value pairs. Click Add basic auth header to include an Authorization header for authenticated requests, or Add JSON content-type header to send the payload as JSON (application/json). The dashboard adds the JSON content-type header automatically when it detects a JSON payload.

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Why does my alert say “No longer supported”?

Alerts with a “No longer supported” label use functionality that was part of our legacy Routes feature and has been deprecated. Some of these features may still work for a time, but will be removed in a future release. You can delete or disable these alerts to stop them from triggering, but they are not editable.
  • SMS notifications (deprecated in early 2023)
  • Slack legacy webhooks
  • IFTTT webhooks
  • Losant webhooks
  • Losant device send state
  • Amazon S3 routing
  • Heartbeat triggers

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Frequently asked questions

No, alerts are processed after an event occurs, and could take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes to be processed and sent.
No, notifications are sent as they happen. However, if this would be useful for your organization, please send us a request using the Feedback button in the Support menu in your dashboard.
Yes, by creating multiple alerts, or subscribing to all events of a specific type. The best way is to tag your SIMs and subscribe to that SIM tag. The event tags checked by Alerts are inclusive, so if you add multiple tags to an alert it must match all of those tags for the alert to be triggered. If multiple _DEVICE_ID_ tags were added to a data limit alert, for example, the alert could never trigger.

How to create an alert

Event variables in alerts

Event types and event tags

Troubleshooting alerts and webhooks