Setup CAD Alerts

Tango Tango forwards CAD incident alerts from your existing CAD system to mobile phones. Setup is easy and doesn't require any changes to your CAD system beyond pointing new-incident emails at an address we provide.

Before you start

You'll need an active Tango Tango account or free trial. If you're not set up yet, start a free trial first — then come back here.

You'll also need admin access to your Tango Tango Admin Portal to manage who receives alerts.

Setup

1. Request a CAD alerting email address. Email us at support@tangotango.net and let us know you want to set up CAD Alerts. We'll reply with an email address specific to your organization.

2. Point your CAD system at that address. In your CAD system, configure new-incident emails to send to the address we provided. Our parser reads those emails and converts them into alerts for your users.

3. Add recipients to the alert group. Once your CAD system is sending us emails, the last step is choosing who gets the alerts:

1. Sign in to the Admin Portal at manage.tangotango.io, or click Sign In at the top of this site.
2. In the left sidebar, click Tones. You'll see your CAD Alert group listed here. (If your agency also uses two-tone paging, those groups appear in the same list.)
3. Open your CAD Alert group, click Members, then Add New to add recipients.

That's it. New incidents from your CAD system will start hitting your team's phones within seconds.

Multiple CAD feeds

If you need separate feeds — say you're a volunteer fire association covering ten departments and each one needs its own alert stream — just request additional alerting email addresses in step 1. Each address maps to its own group in the Admin Portal, so you can route different incident types or different departments to different teams. There's no practical limit on how many feeds you can run.

Troubleshooting

Email us at support@tangotango.net and we'll help you work through it. A few of the most common issues:

Alerts arriving too slowly. Our typical processing time from the time we receive your email is 7 seconds. If you're seeing a long delay than this, typically, the delay is in how long your CAD system takes to send the email. Things to check as you start to troubleshoot:

• How quickly your CAD system actually fires the email after the incident is created. Check your CAD or email system logs.
• Whether the Tango Tango address is the first recipient in your CAD's distribution list, or buried behind other addresses. Moving us to the top often helps. For some systems, each send can take up to a few seconds.
• Whether your email provider holds outbound mail. Gmail's "Undo Send" feature, for example, can hold sent messages for up to 30 seconds — set this to zero for the account sending to us.

Alerts coming through but not parsing correctly. This usually means your CAD system's incident format changed recently. Email us and we'll update the parser to match the new format.

Anything else. Email support@tangotango.net. We'll get on it.

‍