About Sigma RADAR

RADAR is the proactive support program for Sigma, which is designed to alert customers to issues occurring in their Sigma environment that are impacting Sigma users. Through automated analysis of telemetry, the impact of errors and other suboptimal conditions is assessed. When that impact exceeds a threshold, Sigma Support might contact the Sigma admins of affected organizations.

Sigma Support contacts admins of affected Sigma organizations via email, with the initial email containing a number of details about the nature, impact, and remediation of the issue. Responses to emails are handled by a dedicated RADAR team within Sigma Support.

RADAR coverage

How RADAR works

RADAR monitors for a wide variety of issues. Rather than looking for a set of specific errors, the system captures all errors occurring within a customer’s environment, aggregating all occurrences of the same error. For each occurrence, it captures important context like the user and workbook impacted, whether it occurred in an embed or export context, and whether or how often this same error has been observed in the last week. We then assign a numerical score based on these factors, and when that score exceeds an established threshold, a Support Engineer is engaged to investigate the issue and reach out to the customer as appropriate.

Specific areas of focus

To maximize the value of customer outreaches, RADAR monitors specific execution paths which typically correlate with business-impactful operations.
RADAR is focused primarily on errors encountered in the course of running queries on the connected data warehouse in order to fetch the data to populate tables and charts in the workbook or embed. Common errors occurring here include permission denied, SQL errors due to upstream schema changes, and query timeouts. Any kind of error during this stage can potentially trigger a RADAR alert.
In addition to monitoring the warehouse query path, RADAR also specifically monitors events related to embedding of workbooks and elements, scheduled exports and downloads, and calls to Sigma’s public API.

RADAR alert thresholds

As described above, errors are aggregated and scored according to the context and impact as part of Sigma RADAR. Scoring factors include:

• Number of occurrences of the error, and percentage of total operations
• Total number of queries, exports, API calls, etc.
• Unique workbooks and users impacted
• Percentage of total users impacted within an organization
• Whether issue occurs in an embed or export context
• How much issue has occurred in past week (bias towards newly seen issues)
• How frequently issue is occurring today
• Whether error message is generic “An error has occurred” or includes actionable details

Sigma Support combines these factors to arrive at a score for each error, and when that error exceeds a set threshold, a ticket is generated. Support Engineers investigate each ticket and, based on that investigation, potentially reach out to admins of the impacted Sigma organization.

RADAR emails

Responding to RADAR emails

When responding to RADAR emails, review the following guidelines:

• Ensure that the provided Reply-to: address is included in your response to ensure that the response is properly captured in our ticketing system.
• If you want to modify the CC list for RADAR emails, include explicit details about who to remove or add because the ticketing system might not automatically follow changes that you make. If requested, Sigma Support can also make those changes for all RADAR emails sent in the future by updating a preferred contact list.
• Feel free to include attachments in your email, such as screenshots or workbook debugs.

You can also open a live chat with Sigma Support. If you do so, let the Support Engineer you chat with know that you received a RADAR email; this helps Sigma Support track the effectiveness of the program and also ensures context transfer from the Support personnel who performed the initial investigation leading to the RADAR outreach.

Recipients

By default, RADAR emails are sent to all admins of the impacted Sigma organization.

If you want RADAR emails to be sent to a specific list of contacts instead, respond to a RADAR email or open a live chat to provide the desired list of contacts.

Contents

Emails sent as part of Sigma RADAR follow a template that includes the following information:

• A brief introduction of the RADAR proactive monitoring program
• The user-visible error message related to the issue (or description of non-error condition)
• Impact statistics:
  • Number of users affected, versus total number of active users today
  • When the issue was first observed in the last week, and how recently it’s been observed today
• URLs of impacted workbooks
• Names of impacted embedded elements, if any
• Emails of impacted users
• Next steps
• Request for feedback

The next steps are informed by a Support engineer's analysis of the issue in this specific customer context. Depending on the error, the next steps can include instructions or requests for more information.

For embed, export, or API issues, the information provided varies as appropriate. For example, an email about an API issue will identify the API calls affected instead of workbooks or user emails, which are not relevant in the context of the Sigma REST API.

Example RADAR Email

Subject: Re: [Sigma/<customer name>] Impactful error: Rate limit exceeded for workbook exports

Hey <customer> Team,

This is Lyle from Sigma Support. I hope your day is going well. We’re beginning a Proactive Monitoring system in an effort to assist customers in detecting and resolving issues in their workbooks.

We’re reaching out to you because you're Sigma Admins and because we recently detected elevated error rates in calls to Sigma's public API from your org which we believe may be impactful to your operations.

API Error: Rate limit exceeded for workbook exports

Impact Statistics:

• This has impacted 90125/223134 API calls today
• Impacted API endpoint(s): exportWorkbook
• In the past week, this was first observed 2025-11-17 14:48:04 PT, and has occurred as recently as 2025-11-18 12:02:33

Next Steps:

You're hitting the rate limit for the exports API. You may want to handle the errors for rate limit errors with a backoff, to reduce the amount of api requests being sent at any one time. Another option would be to use multiple API tokens in your automation so as not to hit the rate limit.

If this is an ongoing issue that you need support on, feel free to respond to this email.