Overview
If a monitor that controls a certain workflow and sends out notification email is not configured properly, it may result in multiple notification emails being sent out which could flood the recipients' mailboxes.
Diagnosis
Keep in mind that monitors are time-based automations. A monitor will sweep your support queue in hourly intervals. Then Kayako performs whatever actions you define on any conversations that match the rules' criteria. There is no way to configure monitors' rules to run at a specific time. They are executed every hour through server crons and we don't have control over its execution time.
When building monitors, you can select a time-based condition; like how long the conversation has to in certain conditions or status before it breaches an SLA target; or how long should a conversation be at a completed status before a survey is sent out, plus any additional conditions to narrow your subset of conversations.
Therefore, depending on how you set up the monitor conditions and the type of operator used, you may observe that some monitors continue to send out multiple email notifications because as long as the conditions meet the criteria, the monitor will fire the same action.
NOTE: To learn more about the different conditions and actions available when building automations, please visit the Building Automation Conditions article.
Prerequisite
- To edit monitors in Kayako, you need an administrator account with the Manage automations permission.
Solution
To prevent monitors from triggering more than once, you must use the correct logical operator (AND or OR). Also, in the event that you can't find a condition that will suppress the action after it sends out one notification, adding tags would come into play.
The solution below will explain how a monitor that sends out notification emails for "follow-up" works with the right logical operator and tags.
In the image below, notice that we used the operator AND
to tell the monitor that the conditions Conversation: Follow up date - before or
on - Today
and Conversation: Tags - doesn't contain any of the following
- ranfollowup
should be met before the monitor will fire the action.
However, if you use the logical operatorOR
, this will tell the Monitor to trigger if ANY
of the conditions match the criteria. Since we want both conditions to be met before the monitor fires the action, therefore, the right logical operator would be theAND
operator.
In the 'Perform the following actions' section, notice that we are telling the monitor that if the conditions above are met, it will send the notification email to the conversation assignee as well as add the Conversation: Tags
- ranfollowup
. This action means that every time the monitor sends out the notification email for that particular conversation, it will also add the tagranfollowup
to it.
Confirmation
If the above conditions are set, it means that when this monitor runs again the next hour, it will skip any conversation where the ranfollowup
tag is added preventing the multiple notification emails.