Once you have a dashboard you like on your server, you can make sure to get updates about it sent to you via email! Once you look at your dashboard on server you will see a watch icon in the top right corner, which leads to these three options:
Firstly, let's look at subscriptions. When would you want a subscription? The subscription will permit receiving the dashboard via email on a regular basis. For example, you want to receive your weekly KPIs to see how your business performs? Subscriptions will be useful to you! Below you can see the options available for subscriptions. You will receive your email based on the schedule field, you can set a message, choose your users and importantly choose the format. This can be either an image a pdf or both.
Next up is metrics. In my opinion this is the least useful one of the three as either subscriptions or alerts seem more relevant in most cases. Below is the window you see metrics options. To see this you need to select metrics and then select a metric in your data, a point, line, bar etc. One clicked, you will see the view below. An important setting is the comparison type. This allows you to select if you want to see a comparison with historical data (% diff) or compare it to a constant value, target, threshold and allow you to see how far you are from that point.
Finally, alters will be useful to receive when there is something special in your data. Either good, let's say we have reached our target for a certain measure or in a bad way, we've hit a low point in that same measure. Once again we get configuration pane and we have to select an axis (numerical) to set our alert. You have a condition and a threshold, you will notice that when you have this dialog box open, changing the condition and threshold will show a red line/area on your chart to show you when you will receive an alert. You can then decide how often you want to receive this alert at most, this allows you to base this on the next refresh of the data for example so you don't receive the same notification over and over again.
A short blog just to clarify how to use these powerful tools!