What a monitor is
A monitor is four things: where (one or more markets), what (which signals), an optional value range, and a name. Every day it runs against the day that just closed, and what it caught appears on its page and in your Feed.
It is a stored question, not a stored list of results. That matters when you change one: see changing a monitor.
Building one
From Monitors, press New monitor.
- Point at your territory. Click markets on the map, or add them from the list beside it, which does the same job from the keyboard and works when the map cannot load.
- Pick your signals. The menu shows what the markets you picked can actually produce, grouped the way the filters group them. Leave everything unchecked to follow all activity.
- Set a value range, if it helps. A minimum, a maximum, or both.
- Name it. A name is suggested from your picks and you can overwrite it. Below the form, a plain sentence says what the monitor will do, so you can check it against what you meant.
Each plan caps how many places one monitor can span, and the map stops adding once you reach it. To cover more ground, build a second one.
Ask can build one for you. Ask a question about what you want to keep an eye on, and when the answer offers a monitor, approve the card. It is written in the same terms as the question, so a pattern you found by asking keeps being watched.
The signal menu, and what “limited” means
Two things about that menu are worth knowing.
It is the union across your markets, not the intersection. A monitor can span markets with different coverage, and hiding everything they do not all support would silently drop the reason you added the second market. A signal one market carries and another does not still fires; it just fires less often.
Signals marked limited are wired up and have not fired in your markets yet. They are not broken and not hypothetical. Anything a market's records cannot produce is never offered at all, so what is left is the honest remaining distinction: proven here, against wired and waiting. Including one is fine. Building a monitor entirely out of them is how you end up with a fortnight of silence.
The full list of what each signal means is on Signals.
The value range
Value is the dollar figure the record itself carries: a permit's declared job value, a sale price, an assessed amount. Setting a minimum is the fastest way to cut a permit firehose down to the jobs worth a phone call.
Records that carry no value at all do not pass a range filter. Most code violations, occupancy certificates and condition changes carry none, so a monitor with a minimum set will mostly return permits and sales. That is usually what somebody setting one wants, and it is worth knowing before you conclude a signal has gone quiet.
Reading a monitor
Opening a monitor shows the same instrument the map uses, scoped to what this monitor catches.
- A 30-day histogram, stacked and coloured by signal. Clicking a bar jumps to that day.
- A day stepper. Back goes as far as the monitor's history runs; forward stops at today, because there is no day after today.
- Signal chips with counts, which filter the day instantly without refetching. Every chip that occurs starts on, and the last one on cannot be switched off, so you are never left staring at an empty screen with no way back.
- A map of the day's matches and a feed of them, address first. Clicking either opens that record.
The monitors page
The landing page answers three questions in order: is anything happening in my territory, which monitor should I open, and is each one still working.
The chart at the top is the pulse: everything happening across the markets you watch, unfiltered. It is deliberately not the sum of your monitors. Each card below charts only what its own filters catch, and the distance between the two is the useful part. A tall pulse over flat cards means your filters are tight, or that a second monitor is worth having.
Each card shows this week's count, a fourteen-day sparkline, the monitor's configuration in one line, and, on a quiet one, when it last caught anything. The window is fourteen days rather than seven because activity is sharply weekday-shaped: a trailing week is five tall bars and two flat ones, and only the position of the flat pair ever changes. Two weeks shows the rhythm and lets you compare this week with last.
A card reading Nothing in 14 days still draws its sparkline. Fourteen empty days say "we looked and there was nothing", which blank space does not.
Changing a monitor
Edit is on the card's overflow menu and on the monitor's own page. It is the same screen as the builder.
Filters apply to the whole history, not just from now on. A monitor is a stored question re-run per day, so narrowing it makes last week look quieter too, and widening it can surface things you had not seen. This is intended, and the builder says so while you are editing.
Active
Whether the monitor is live. An active monitor keeps matching, and it is what your plan counts. Deactivating one stops it and frees the slot; its history stays and you can still open it. This is also what a downgrade uses, rather than deleting anything. What an active monitor catches appears on its own page, a day at a time, and in your Feed.
How many you can have
Your plan sets how many monitors can be active. It does not limit how many you can keep.
So at your limit you have two ways forward, and the counter above the list shows both numbers: deactivate one you are not using and activate the one you want instead, or move up a plan. Swapping costs nothing and takes two clicks.
The cap is per person, not pooled across the organization. Everybody on a team plan gets their own, which is what makes a shared account workable: an estimator and a business developer follow different things over the same ground without competing for slots.
There is a separate, much higher ceiling on how many monitors you can keep in total, active or not. It is not something a normal account meets; if you do, the page says so and deleting one you no longer want clears it. Current plan numbers are on billing.
Deleting one
Delete is on the card's overflow menu. It asks first, and it cannot be undone. Deleting a monitor does not touch any property you have activated; those belong to the organization and stay.
When monitors stop
Monitors need an active plan. If a subscription lapses or is cancelled, the monitors stay exactly as configured and the whole surface asks you to subscribe. Resubscribing brings them back unchanged.
Moving to a smaller plan deactivates the newest monitors over the new limit. Nothing is deleted: every one of them is still there with its history, still openable, and its settings are untouched. You choose which ones stay live by deactivating one and activating another.