Notifying users about incidents or critical processes at the right time is at the core of an optimally functioning operation. Ubidots simplifies this process with the Notify User event action, allowing you to select users from your account and notify them via SMS, email, voice call, or Telegram.
Learn how to create a Notify User action following this guide.
Requirements
Ubidots Industrial license and above
1. Add user’s contact information
To add the contact information that will be used to notify your users, follow these steps:
Head to the “Users” tab in the main navbar → “Users”.
Click on the “+” button located at the upper right corner of the screen to create a new user. Follow this guide to create a new user.
In the second stage of the user creation process, enter the user’s contact information.
Notes:
Make sure to include country codes for phone numbers (e.g., "+1" for the US) to ensure message delivery. For example, typing 1 212 361 4595 here would work for an American number.
To add contact information to an already existing user, simply edit that user and head to the “contact method” section.
2. Create a new event
To begin, head to the “data” tab →"Events" and hover over the “+” button, located at the upper right corner of the screen, and create a conditional event, global event, or scheduled event depending on your needs.
Next, configure the event’s triggers with an AND/OR logic. For additional details on how to configure these triggers, head to their corresponding guides: value based, inactivity, geofence.
3. Configure the Notify User action
With the "trigger" logic configured, it’s now time to set up the Notify User action.
1. Click on the “+ add action” button. From the available options, select “Notify User”.
2. Choose one or multiple users to be notified using the “user list” option. The contact information you added for those users in their settings (section 1) will be used here.
3. Choose one or multiple contact methods out of these options:
Email
SMS
Telegram
Voice call
4. Customize the “active trigger” and the “back to normal” (optional) texts to be delivered to the receiving user(s). If “email” was one of the chosen contact methods, you can also change the subject of the message.
By using the tag icon at the upper right corners of the “subject” and “message” fields you can easily add information such as device ID, timestamp, variable name, etc.
Note: By default, data inputs involving timestamps are sent in human-readable format (YYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss TZ). If you'd rather attach UNIX epoch time in milliseconds, double-click on the data input and delete the text from the pipe symbol ("|") until the end, as shown below.
5. Optionally, enable the “repeat action” if you want to repeat the action multiple times while the event is triggered. You can choose how often and up to how many times the action will be repeated. There’s a limit of 50 action repetitions.
6. Click on “save” once you finish configuring the action and on “next”, unless you want to set up multiple actions.
7. After completing the action configuration you’ll proceed to the final step, the “settings” tab. There, you’ll name the event and give it a description (optional).
8. Another optional step is to use a tag on the event. This is a great tool to control what your end users see in your app. In this case, for instance, you could decide that your end user sees one event, but not another, using tags. Learn more about tags here.
9. Finally (unless the event you created is a scheduled event), determine the activity window in which the events should be executed. An event can have multiple active windows by clicking on the “+ add window button” and configuring them correspondingly. After finishing this, click on “save” and your event will be deployed.
Note:
The different contact methods available in the Notify User action follow the same pricing logic of equivalent actions.