Tag watchers

Your own personal alarms — watch the values that matter to you across every project, without touching shared alarms.

A tag watcher is a personal alarm. It behaves like a project alarm — it watches values and activates when something’s wrong — but it’s yours: it’s private to you, it doesn’t change anything other people see, and, unlike a project alarm, a single watcher can span several projects at once.

Tag watcher vs. project alarm

Use a project alarm when the alert belongs to the building — everyone working that project should see it and respond. Those are configured per project, are shared, appear in the Alarm Manager, and changing them needs permission on that project.

Use a tag watcher when the alert belongs to you — the handful of values you personally keep an eye on, perhaps across several sites. You don’t add noise to a project’s shared alarms and you don’t need permission to change anything. Tag watchers live at the organization level, alongside your other cross-project tools, rather than inside one project.

The catch is the flip side of the same coin: because a watcher is yours alone, nobody else is covered by it. Anything the team must not miss belongs in a project alarm.

Creating a watcher

A tag watcher has these parts.

General

Name — what the watcher is called in your list.
Description (optional) — what it’s for, so a list of a dozen watchers stays readable months later.
Enabled — turn the watcher off without deleting it.

Sensitivity

Activation delay — how long, in seconds, the condition must hold before the watcher activates.
Deactivation delay — how long conditions must be back to normal before it clears.

Both default to none, which means the watcher reacts to the very first reading that matches. Give a watcher a few seconds of activation delay when the value is noisy, so a single spike doesn’t alert you; give it a deactivation delay when a value hovers around its threshold and would otherwise flap on and off.

Condition criteria

Once a watcher has more than one condition, a Condition criteria section appears. Match decides how they combine:

All — every condition must be met at the same time for the watcher to activate.
Any — one condition being met is enough.

Conditions

Conditions use exactly the same types as project alarms, so everything on Alarm conditions applies here too — number value, boolean value, bit value, number of changes, ping, and planar range. Add as many as you need, drag to reorder them, and use the row’s menu to duplicate or remove one.

Watching across projects

This is what a tag watcher can do that a project alarm can’t. Each condition names the project its tags come from, and different conditions can name different projects:

Source project — the project the condition’s watched tag lives in. Pick it first: the rest of the condition stays hidden until you do, because what you can compare depends on which project’s tags you’re working with.
Target project — for a number or boolean condition compared against another tag rather than a fixed value, the project that comparison tag lives in. It defaults to the source project, so leave it alone for an ordinary same-building comparison and change it only when you’re deliberately comparing across sites.

A planar range condition takes a project per axis — Source project X and Source project Y — so the two axes can come from different buildings. A ping condition has no project selector, since it watches reachability rather than a tag’s value.

Comparing across projects is what makes a watcher worth the trouble: alert me when the outdoor temperature at site A is below the supply temperature at site B, or when any of five buildings reports a pump stopped.

What you see

The watcher list shows each watcher’s name and description and whether it’s currently Active. There’s also a Last activated column, hidden until you turn it on under Preferences; a watcher that has never activated shows a dash there. Open the watcher itself and it spells out Never, alongside its sensitivity and the conditions as configured.

Your access to a watched value still follows your project permissions. A watcher can only read tags in projects you have access to, and losing access to a project means its conditions stop resolving.