IdleAlert

It’s very quiet today. You’ve seen no errors or problem alerts – all seems well with your workflow. Your prepress team are having a slow day too, with no preflight errors or manual processes to deal with – this must be the result of the hard work you have been putting in. Come to think of it, there wasn’t a lot happening when you walked through the print room this morning. Perhaps the work has dried up, or there’s been some apocalyptic event that you all missed somehow. It’s strange but somewhat familiar – the last time this happened it was because…

[phone rings ominously]

It turns out that the upstream process which delivers jobs to your Switch flow has failed again. Jobs have been piling up since last night waiting to be processed. If only there was some way that you could have been warned when there were no new jobs for over an hour!

IdleAlert will check if any job has passed through it within a chosen time period. If not, it will submit a text file into your flow containing information on the flow, flow element, and the last job that arrived.

There are additional options for handling business hours, days of the week and date exceptions (such as public holidays) so that you only receive alerts when you want them.

The resulting text file could be used to trigger an email or Slack notification so that you can be notified in your preferred way when there is no activity. It could even be used to trigger an API call or database update so that inactivity can be logged and used to generate useful reports.