Notification Templates

Notification templates let you customize the format and content of alerts in Acceldata Data Observability Cloud (ADOC). With templates, you control how notifications look, what information they include, and how they integrate with your downstream tools and workflows.

Templates make alerts clearer, more actionable, and easier to automate across email, chat, ITSM, and webhook-based systems.

Why Use Custom Notification Templates?

By default, ADOC uses system-defined notification formats. These are safe, production-tested defaults, but they may not always match your business processes or tooling.

Problems With Generic Notifications

Challenge	What It Looks Like in Practice
Generic or inconsistent alerts	Different policies send slightly different subjects and payload layouts.
Manual triage and routing	Engineers manually move alerts into the right Slack channels or queues.
Slower response and remediation	On-call teams must click into ADOC to understand what happened.

What Custom Templates Enable

Capability	Examples
Tailored content	Emphasize severity, affected asset, and business impact.
Tool-specific payloads	JSON bodies that match PagerDuty, ServiceNow, or custom webhook schemas.
Routing & automation hints	Include fields used by runbooks or workflow engines for routing.
Business-friendly summaries	Different layouts for on-call engineers vs. business stakeholders.

Custom notification templates transform alerts from “system messages” into first-class workflow events.

Concepts and Terminology

System Templates vs. Custom Templates

ADOC ships with system templates for every supported channel and source type. These are:

Safe defaults
Updated with each ADOC release
Used automatically when no custom template is configured

You can optionally create custom templates that override system templates for a specific combination of:

Source type (for example, Data Quality, Reconciliation, Data Freshness, Pipeline Monitoring, Profiling)
Channel (Email, Webhook, Slack, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, Jira, ServiceNow)

Type	Owned By	Editable?	When Used
System template	Acceldata	No	Fallback when no custom template is configured
Custom template	Your tenant	Yes	When a matching Template Group + channel + source type is set

System templates continue to work even when you add custom ones, so you always have a safe fallback.

Notification Template Groups

Customization is organized into Notification Template Groups. A Template Group is a named collection of templates that:

Targets one or more source types(for example, Data Quality, Reconciliation, Pipeline Monitoring)
Contains one template per channel you want to customize
Is attached to one or more Notification Groups

Think of a Template Group as: “All the templates that define how this notification group talks to email, Slack, webhooks, etc.”

Template Group Structure

Field	Description
Name	Human-friendly identifier (e.g., Prod – DQ Alerts – Slack & PagerDuty)
Description	Optional business description or usage notes
Source types	Policy types this group applies to (Data Quality, Freshness, etc.)
Channels	Email, Webhook, Slack, Google Chat, Teams, Jira, ServiceNow
Templates	Per-channel content authored in FreeMarker (FTL)

Supported Channels and Source Types

Channels

ADOC supports templates for multiple communication and incident-management systems.

Channel	Format Type	Typical Use Case
Email	HTML or plain text	Human-readable notifications
Webhook	JSON	Integration with workflow / custom tools
Slack	JSON (Block Kit)	Team collaboration & on-call updates
Google Chat	JSON (Card messages)	Chat-based collaboration
Microsoft Teams	JSON (MessageCard / Adaptive Card)	Enterprise chat and incident channels
ServiceNow	Plain text or JSON payload	ITSM incident creation / updates
Jira	JSON (Atlassian Document Format / issue fields)	Issue / ticket creation & enrichment

Each channel has its own schema and constraints. Templates must emit valid HTML, JSON, or platform schema for that channel.

Policy and Source Types

Template variables and data shape depend on the source type that generates the notification. Typical source types include:

Source Type	What It Represents
Data Quality	Rules and scores for table-level quality checks
Reconciliation	Cross-system comparison of record counts and values
Schema Drift	Changes to table structure (added/removed/modified columns)
Data Drift	Statistical changes in value distributions
Data Freshness	Timeliness / delay of arriving data
Pipeline Monitoring	Status and performance of data pipelines
Profiling & Profile Anomaly	Table profiling and anomaly detection on profile metrics

Each source type exposes a different set of template variables.

How ADOC Selects a Template

When a policy execution generates a notification, ADOC chooses a template in this order:

Identify Notification Group: Policy → Notification Group(s) based on your Alerts & Notifications configuration.
Resolve Template Group: Check if the Notification Group has a Custom Template Group selected.
Determine Source Type and Channel: Example: Data Quality → Slack.
Find Matching Template in Group

Case	Behavior
Custom template exists for source + channel	ADOC renders notification using that custom template
No custom template, but system template exists	ADOC uses system template for that source + channel
Neither exists (edge cases)	Notification may be skipped or fall back to minimal default (rare)

As long as you have either a system template or a custom template for a source+channel, alerts keep flowing.

Prerequisites and Roles

Permissions and Access

To create and manage Notification Templates, you typically need an admin-level or configuration role in ADOC.

Requirement	Why It Matters
Access to Settings	Notification Templates live under Settings > Notifications
Knowledge of policies	You need to know what your Data Quality / Pipeline policies do
Knowledge of channels	Email / Slack / Webhook mappings and any external API requirements
Coordination with owners	To agree on severity mapping, routing, and incident rules

High-Level Workflow

At a high level, working with Notification Templates looks like this:

Plan what you want to change Decide which alerts, channels, and teams you want to customize, and why (for example, on-call vs. business stakeholders, or different behavior for prod vs. non-prod).
Create a Notification Template Group Define the “bundle” of templates that will apply to specific source types (such as Data Quality, Freshness, or Pipeline Monitoring).
Author per-channel templates in FTL For each channel (Email, Webhook, Slack, etc.), build HTML/JSON content using variables and conditional logic that match your tools and audience.
Preview and test against sample executions Use the preview and test functions to validate layout, variables, and schema against real or sample executions before going live.
Attach the Template Group to a Notification Group Update your Notification Group configuration so that alerts use your new Template Group instead of only relying on system defaults.
Monitor and refine over time Collect feedback from users, review incidents, and iterate on the templates to improve clarity, routing, and actionability.