Want to know when a smart list hits a particular threshold

[Madison_Lundqui]

Hi there! I'm looking at setting up an alert to help me spot errors in our integration. 

For example, is there a way to set up an alert email that isn't triggered on every error, but rather if a certain threshold of errors happen one day. i.e. say 50 people fail to sync to our CRM, send an alert...there is a field in Marketo that would tell me if the sync failed, I just don't want that alert email to trigger unless a large number fail to sync....

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

There’s a fundamental reason why this would never be possible with a Smart List: SLs don’t maintain their count. You have to refresh them to get the count at that particular point in time. And they don’t continually refresh — that would be catastrophic for performance.

So the only way (even in theory) this could work is with a static collection such as a List, populated via trigger, since it has static membership. But still, there’s no built-in way to send an alert based on the number of people in a List.

The way we do this is by calling a webhook-compatible service that maintains a shared counter across calls. Then you can determine when the counter exceeds a certain number. (It’s really the same idea as an event registration cap, just with more of a negative connotation!)

[Darshil_Shah1]

Alternatively, you can set a smart list subscription so that you get a daily report on the number of people in SL that'd allow you to monitor w/o logging into Marketo and checking the SL (depending on the number of records you usually see encountering the sync error, you can also change the frequency of the subscription). Of course, this isn't the same as getting notified when a set number of people qualify for the SL criteria, but you can at least use this in the interim you build the solution that Sandy recommended.