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PMTA knowledge base›Monitor screen§ 11.1.9

The vendor analytics overview

Signals Overview Display
Health score and traps on one page

The SparkPost Signals overview: leaderboards for three signals — health score, spam traps and engagement recency. PowerMTA does not yet support the engagement recency summary.

A row is a SparkPost subaccount, and it can be broken down by campaign (job identifier), address pool or sending domain. Data is available for up to 90 days.

The report lives in the SparkPost application, not in the node’s monitor: the node only sends accounting data there and reads nothing back. Access to the report is through a SparkPost account, not http-access.

The main trap is expecting a health score without engagement tracking. The manual calls open and click events the most important data source for the health score: without tracking — your own or the one built into the engine — the score has nothing to fully rely on.
What the Hub does. It does not use it: the Hub does not write a <signals> block, and no data goes from the nodes to SparkPost. The Hub has no aggregate health score: its analytics show trends by receiver and address without a rating.
Recommended values

Where to look for what:

Question Where
health score and its trend here
trap hits by day the spam traps report
bounces in SparkPost’s classification the Signals bounce report
The three signals, the unsupported recency summary, the breakdowns and the period of up to 90 days come from the manual (§ 11.1.9); the role of engagement for the health score is § 11.1.2. The split of questions is ours.
Example configuration
# without a signals block no data goes to the service and the report is empty
<signals>
    api-key 0123456789abcdef012345678901234567890123</signals>
The key is 40 hexadecimal characters issued by SparkPost; without the api-key line the engine with a <signals> block will not start.
yellow — — directive names, blue — blocks. They are highlighted the same way in the text of the card.
Compatibility
PowerMTA 6.0
described in the manual of this version · platform: any
The vendor does not state the first version for every directive — there is no note here. The name also appears in the 5.0 edition of the manual.
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Related entries

1 relation

Where you can see it

The vendor's analytics — and what leaves the node for itThe mechanism that is visible here. § 11.1.9

How to check on the node
Check whether data goes to the service at all:
grep -n -A3 '<signals>' /etc/pmta/config
grep -n 'enable-signals' /etc/pmta/config
No block means no report. enable-signals false on an address or pool turns off data sending only for them.
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What else to read

3 articles

◇What the node tells about itself and through which channelsSeven observation surfaces: the web monitor, the console in four formats, the log, accounting, accounting search, metrics and export to external analytics.◇The watchdog that restarts the engineKeeps an eye on the engine and brings it back up after a crash by itself, sending a crash report to the postmaster address.◇How the policy for a receiver is assembledSettings are assembled from the most general pattern to the most precise; the order of blocks in the file means nothing.

In the Hub
Cost of a mistake
safe: a wrong value breaks nothing
Scenarios
Troubleshoot deliverability