Web Push Notifications for Dashboards: Turn KPI Changes into Instant Alerts

Why Dashboards Need Push, Not Just Pull

A well-built dashboard answers "how are we doing?" for anyone who opens it. What it can't do on its own is decide that something needs attention now. That gap shows up in a few familiar ways:

The rule of thumb: let the dashboard show everything, and let push notifications flag only the few changes that need someone to act.

Sending Alerts Automatically from Your Data

Manual notifications are fine for announcements, but the real value is in alerts that fire on their own. Push Agent's REST API (Growth plan and up) sends a notification to all of a website's subscribers — or only those in certain countries, or on certain devices or browsers — from any script. Create an API key under API & WooCommerce in your Push Agent dashboard, then run a check like this every 15 minutes with cron (the opening PHP tag is left out here so the article itself stays safe to publish):

// low-stock-alert.php: run every 15 minutes from cron
// (save it as a .php file that starts with the usual PHP opening tag)
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=shop', 'db_user', 'db_password');
$low = (int) $pdo->query('SELECT COUNT(*) FROM products WHERE stock < 5')->fetchColumn();

// Only alert when the number changes, so the team isn't told the same thing twice.
$stateFile = __DIR__ . '/low-stock.last';
if ($low === 0 || $low === (int) @file_get_contents($stateFile)) {
    exit;
}
file_put_contents($stateFile, (string) $low);

$ch = curl_init('https://app.pushagent.net/api/v1/campaigns');
curl_setopt_array($ch, [
    CURLOPT_POST           => true,
    CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
    CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER     => [
        'Content-Type: application/json',
        'X-PushAgent-Key: ' . getenv('PUSHAGENT_API_KEY'),
    ],
    CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS     => json_encode([
        'title' => "$low products are low on stock",
        'body'  => 'Open the inventory dashboard to reorder before they sell out.',
        'url'   => 'https://dashboards.example.com/inventory',
    ]),
]);
echo curl_exec($ch);

A few details that keep automated alerts useful:

• Keep the title short. Titles can be up to 65 characters and messages up to 240, but browsers cut long titles, especially on phones.
• Link to the exact view — the filtered chart, not the dashboard's home page.
• Alert on change, not on state. As in the example, remember what you last sent, so a metric that stays over the line doesn't trigger the same alert every 15 minutes.
• Store the API key outside your code, for example in an environment variable, and revoke it from the Push Agent dashboard if it's ever exposed.