Notifications are used to alert Sonar users for various events that occur within the instance; this can range from being notified of when a ticket is assigned to you or a group you belong to, to being made aware of an upcoming due date for an assigned task. These notifications are available in different formats and help to eliminate the chance of important events and information from going unnoticed.

Notification Types

Currently, there are three different types of notifications available: in-app notifications, email notifications, and SMS Notifications. Users can opt to receive all notification types, just in-app, just email, or none. In-app and email notifications are explained in further detail below.

In-App Notifications

In-app notifications allow you to receive updates without needing to navigate out of your Sonar instance. When a notification is received, a red badge will appear on the Sonar icon in the top-left corner of your instance; the number displayed in the red badge will indicate the number of unread notifications.

To view the notifications, simply click on the Sonar icon, and the list of notifications will be displayed. For each individual notification in the list, there will be an indicator of how long ago the event occurred, visible from the far-right side of the notification item.

Notifications vs Alerts

Within the Notifications list are two tabs: Notifications and Alerts. All in-app notifications will appear under the "Notifications" tab, except network alerts that are generated as part of an alerting rotation; if you have in-app notifications toggled on for the "When a network alert is generated for one of my alerting rotations" event, then these specific notifications will appear under the "Alerts" tab instead.

Sorting by Time, Category, and Entity

With the in-app notification list, users can sort their notifications by time, category, or entity.

Time: Selecting the "Time" button will sort the notification list by how long ago the event occurred, with the most recent notifications displayed at the top of the list.

This list will be further split up into "Read" and "Unread" sections; when a new notification is received, it will be housed under the "Unread" section, moving into "Read" once the notification has been viewed.

Category: Selecting the "Category" button will group the notifications based on event type. For example, any job-related notifications will be grouped together and displayed under the subheading "Job", whereas task-related notifications will be grouped together and displayed under the subheading "Task".

Within each of these subsections, all the notifications will be sorted by how long ago the event occurred, with the most recent notification being displayed at the top of the section.

Entity: Selecting the "Entity" button will group notifications by the individual event, and display multiple notifications for the same event together. For example, as can be seen in the image below, each job or task that is assigned will appear as individual entities within the notifications list; if there are multiple events for the same entity (such as having a job assigned to you which is then rescheduled and completed successfully), they will all appear under that specific entity.

For each entity in the list, all the notifications will be sorted by how long ago the event occurred, with the most recent notification being displayed first.

Email Notifications

With email notifications, updates will be sent in an email directly to your inbox, based on the email address that is associated with your Sonar instance user. These emails are defaults within the system and do not require any configuration in order for email notifications to be functional.

When an event triggers a notification, an email will be sent to your inbox and the email subject will be reflective of the event that occurred.

Within the email itself, the format will be similar to other communications that are sent from your Sonar instance; for example, your company logo will be present, along with your company information that is displayed through the footer at the bottom of the email. Additional key details will be contained within the email, such as the time and date the event occurred, and will vary depending on the type of event that was triggered (for example, if a job you are assigned to was completed successfully, it will also include the name of the user that completed the job).

Updating Your Notification Preferences

Your notification preferences can only be accessed by your instance user, and are available from the “User Profile” page for your Sonar instance user – you can navigate there by clicking your user avatar in the top-right corner of your instance:

All the events that you can be notified of will be listed in the Notification Preferences sub-tab. For each event, there will be a toggle for in-app notifications and email notifications; toggling the events here will determine which notifications you receive, and in what format.

Any changes made to your notification preferences are saved automatically.