Understanding Data Sources

Understanding Data Sources

Watchtower updates information in three ways. You do not need to run a full health report every time you open the dashboard.

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At a glance

Kind	Plain English	When it updates
Live	Charts while you watch	Every few seconds while the dashboard is open
Background scan	Logs, crashes, recent activity	About once a minute while the server runs
Full report	Complete fix list and deep mod check	When you run a report or on a schedule

Short version: charts refresh while you are looking. The server keeps checking logs and crashes in the background even when nobody has the dashboard open. A full report is the deep check — run it on a schedule (e.g. every hour), not every visit.

Open the Sources tab to see when each layer last updated on your server.

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What needs a full report?

Feature	Background enough?	Needs full report?
Live charts	Yes	No
Crash list (basic)	Yes	Deeper details from last report
Recent activity	Yes	Older history from reports
Lag spike notes	Yes	No
Issues — full fix list	No	Yes
Mods — full list and conflicts	Partial (log errors)	Yes for deep analysis
Who is online now	Yes	Playtime stats from report
Backups (after setup)	Yes (rescan)	First setup from report
Report history	No	Yes

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In the dashboard

Where to look	What it shows
Sources tab	When live, background scan, and last report ran
Badges on cards	Live / Scanned / Report / Mixed
Text under tab titles	One-line explanation of where data comes from
Settings → Monitoring	Read-only list of intervals and retention

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Technical details

Files on disk

File	Layer	Written by
live-history.json	Live	Metrics while dashboard samples
performance-rollups.json	Minute history	Once per minute
ops-cache.json	Background scan	Log and crash checks (~60s)
incidents/*.json	Lag snapshots	Auto lag detection
watchtower-facts-*.json	Full report	Manual or scheduled report

Settings that control timing

What	Where to change
Live chart sample rate	config/watchtower-server.toml (restart required)
Background scan interval	watchtower/watchtower.conf or Settings
Report schedule	Settings → General

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See also

• Health Reports — what a full report contains
• Scheduled Reports — automate full reports
• Dashboard Tabs — per-tab behaviour
• Roadmap — upcoming improvements