Can I Create Alerts Manually in Visual Investigator? Yes—as of release 10.2!
In the current releases (10.2 and above) of SAS Visual Investigator, if an analyst detects an indication of possible suspicious or fraudulent behavior, an alert can be created on the spot, provided the administrator has configured the environment to allow the manual feature.
Just for review, recall that
- An alert is an event that indicates potentially suspicious behavior by an entity.
- An alert is created by sending an alert event about a known entity to the Visual Investigator alert service.
Of course, alerts can also be configured using an alert generation process provided with the Scenario Administration interface of SAS Visual Analytics and other SAS external tools, but this blog will focus on the manual feature. To enable analysts to create manual alerts, the feature must be configured by an administrator. The administrator will need to
- Assign the Create Alert button to the appropriate entities on the Data Objects page.
- Specify the queues that can accept manual alerts by selecting Allow Manually created alerts to be routed to the queue in the queue Settings.
Analysts can only route alerts to queues that both
- Accept manual alerts
- Belong to strategies that the user is allowed to access.
Recall that both strategies and queues are created by the administrator.
Here’s how it works:
Any queue that is to be capable of receiving manual alerts, must have the options selected in its Settings to allow routing of manual alerts:
Then the Create Alert Button action must be added to the Toolbar of an entity (Pages and Toolbar tab). In this example, the Household entity will have the Create Alert action on its page toolbar:
When the analyst clicks the Alert button, the Create an Alert dialog opens to enable selection of a Queue for the alert, and addition of notes. Only queues enabled to accept manual alerts will display in the Queue pull-down list.
When the analyst clicks OK, the new alert is created and opened.
The alert will display on the home page Alert Summary, corresponding to the strategy associated with the selected queue.
To see how alerts are created in the Scenario Administration interface, see the recent article by Mary Kathryn Queen.
