The problem:
Are people following best practices?
Whose computers haven’t been restarted in 3 days?
Do we have more active licenses than are currently in use?
When you’re responsible for the digital footprint of a large practice, these questions are more than just curiosities; they’re landmines. We have the data, the trick is surfacing it the moment it matters.
Dashboards = Hindsight | Rules = Foresight
We have the dashboards to keep an eye on these things. Open the Model Traffic Light Metrics dashboard, and red cells in a table indicate which metrics within a file require attention. Check the Software Version dashboard to verify that everyone in a project is using the same Revit build. These are great for routine inspections, but they are only one piece of the puzzle. A firm has a lot of things going on, and you’re probably busy. You can’t have eyes everywhere.
This is where rules come into play. Think of them as smoke detectors for bad practices. They ping you so you know exactly where to look. Or heck, even to let you know when best practices are being followed. That’s deserving of a ping; give them a gold star.
Out-of-the-box rules
Bimbeats ships with out-of-the-box rules for the usual suspects:
- Central file opened directly
- Someone moved the project base point
- The model takes more than 10 minutes to sync
If anyone crosses a threshold, the rules fire, and you get a ping on Teams, Slack, Email, carrier pigeon if you so wish (maybe if you find a way to send one off via a webhook).
They are similar to watchers, which Konrad covered in a post back in 2021, to stop people from working in the central file. Rules are watchers-lite, in that they are much easier to set up.
The rules we pre-packaged are just the tip of the iceberg; they are there to show you what you can do with them, and for users to open up and dissect to see how they are working.
Any search can be turned into a rule
Rules are so simple that they can be described as a search query with a timer. If you can filter it in Discover, you can turn it into a rule.
In the same way you would apply filters to an index, you build out your queries to hone in on data relevant to whatever you are interested in at the time. If you want to see files that are larger than 1 GB, you can filter for file.size > 1GB, and you will see all your documents that include the field file size and whose value is greater than 1 GB. Pretty Straightforward.
A rule runs this search at a given interval, say 1 minute, so that if at any instance a user syncs and the file size crosses the threshold, a document will match the query, and the rule will be triggered.
And action
Now, the basic action taken after a rule is met is to send a message somewhere, letting you know that ‘hey, this rule was triggered and here is some relevant information for you’. But that is only the beginning of what you can do with these things. Some Bimbeats users have created rules that revoke a license seat if not used for a certain period, or notify IT when users run low on Hard Drive space
The how-to
This is where we would normally get into how to create a rule in this blog format, but instead I recorded a tutorial video in an effort to create learning material for Bimbeats users.
The plug
If you’re already a Bimbeats user, the Rules tab is waiting. Go break something. If you’re not, no sweat; everything above works on plain Elastic too, but Bimbeats already collects the data points you need to create alerts that are relevant to your process. And if you want a demo, our calendar link is HERE.
