Watchtower Settings

Watchtower Settings

Watchtower → Settings decides which cards appear on the dashboard and what each figure is counting.

Everything here trims a dashboard that is already correct. Leave the whole screen alone and Watchtower behaves exactly as it does out of the box: every card drawn, every status counted. Nothing needs configuring for the numbers to be right.

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Why the settings live here and not in each module

The statuses these settings refer to are created and renamed in their own modules — ticket statuses under Tickets, task statuses under Tasks, impact levels under Service Status.

But "show this one on my dashboard" is not a fact about a status. Your statuses carry their own facts — whether they count as closed, which one is the default, whether they pause the SLA clock — and the SLA engine and much else depend on those. One dashboard's preferences have no business mixed in with them.

Practically, it also means you tune Watchtower in one place instead of touring three other modules' settings screens looking for it.

Each row on this screen is tagged with the module it affects, in that module's own colour, so it stays obvious which part of FreeITSM you are changing.

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Cards

Ten cards, each on or off. Turn off the ones your team does not watch.

Card	What it shows
Morning Checks	Whether today's round has been done, and how it went
Tickets	Open tickets by status, high priority, unassigned, paused too long
Changes	Open changes by status, awaiting approval, in progress, scheduled
Calendar	Today's events and the week ahead
Service Status	Degraded services and open incidents
Contracts	Contracts expiring and notice periods running out
Knowledge	Recent articles and reviews now overdue
Assets	Warranties expiring and assets not seen recently
Tasks	Open tasks by status, overdue and due today
Workflows	Failed or aborted runs, and webhooks that have stopped delivering

Hiding a card changes nothing but your dashboard — each module still shows everything in its own screens.

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Counts

Each of these counts every status you have, which is why a status you rename or add keeps working without being mentioned anywhere in here. Narrow one only if a card is showing more than you want to read at a glance.

Every entry has the same shape: leave "choose specific ones" off to include everything — now and anything added later — or turn it on and tick the ones you want.

Setting	Module	What it decides
Ticket statuses shown	Tickets	One figure per open status, plus a total. The total always matches what is listed beside it
Priorities counted as high priority	Tickets	The red "high priority tickets" line. Left alone it means any priority ranked above your default one, so a new priority added above it is included automatically
Change statuses shown	Changes	One figure per open change status, plus a total
Impact levels shown on the card	Service Status	Which levels put a service on Watchtower. Left alone, anything other than your healthy level does
Impact levels that turn the light red	Service Status	Everything else shows amber
Task statuses shown	Tasks	One figure per open task status, plus a total
Morning check statuses that need attention	Morning Checks	Which results count as a problem
Paused too long	Tickets	How many hours a ticket may sit with its SLA clock stopped before Watchtower mentions it

The two that are worth reading properly

Morning check statuses that need attention. Nothing in FreeITSM records which of your morning-check statuses is a pass and which is a problem — they are just labels with colours, and you can rename them. Until you say, the card assumes only the first status in your own order is good, and it never claims your checks have passed, only that they are done. Tell it which statuses mean trouble and it will use that instead.

Impact levels that turn the light red. This is kept separate from the counts as downtime setting on each impact level, on purpose. That one decides your uptime percentages — a reporting fact. If the two were the same setting, wanting a degraded service drawn amber would mean falsifying your uptime figures to get it. Left alone, this follows counts as downtime, so nothing changes until you say otherwise.

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Paused too long

This threshold has been read on every dashboard load since it was added and, until now, could only be changed by editing the database directly. It has a box on this screen.

It governs the "N tickets paused over Nh (SLA clock stopped)" line, which is there to surface tickets being parked in a paused status to escape the SLA clock. The default is 24 hours.

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Permissions

Two separate permissions, because they carry different risk:

Permission	Covers
Choose which cards appear on Watchtower	The Cards tab. Hiding a card tidies a screen
Choose which statuses and priorities each Watchtower count includes	The Counts tab. Narrowing a count changes what a number means — the figure everyone reads each morning quietly changes definition

Neither grants any access to the modules being counted. Each card already shows only what you are allowed to see.

A tab you do not hold is never drawn, and the Settings link only appears for analysts who hold at least one of them. See Roles and permissions.

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Related pages

• Watchtower — the dashboard itself
• Watchtower settings — Developer Guide — the storage model and how to add a new setting
• Browser extension — the same figures in your toolbar
• Never identify a lookup row by its name — why the counts read flags rather than words
• Roles and permissions — granting the two capabilities