Some of your tickets are quietly counting down to an SLA breach. Watchlists surface those automatically — color-coded by urgency — so you can spot what's at risk before it bites.

Watchlists

Problem: You have 22 tickets assigned. Some have SLA deadlines today, some next week, some are already overdue. You can't tell at a glance which need attention now without scanning every row and doing the math.

Horizon's answer: Watchlists. A watchlist is a deadline monitor your admin sets up to bucket open tickets into urgency stages — color-coded by how close (or how far past) they are to a watched deadline. As an agent, you see your own tickets surfaced through any active watchlist, so you can triage by urgency instead of by manual scanning.

What a watchlist actually does

Each watchlist watches a specific datetime field on the ticket — could be the SLA resolution due date, the last-updated timestamp, the last-customer-response timestamp, or anything else your admin picks. It then assigns each open ticket to a stage based on how many minutes remain or have elapsed:

• Approaching stages — counting down to a future moment. Example (watching SLA due date): "Due in 24h", "Due in 4h", "Due in 30m", getting more urgent as time runs out.
• Elapsed stages — counting up from a past moment. Example (watching last-touched timestamp): "Untouched 4h", "Untouched 1d", "Untouched 3d+", getting more urgent the longer the ticket sits.

Your admin defines which field is watched, what stages exist, the time thresholds, and the colors.

Watchlists are also a workflow trigger

Beyond visibility, watchlists can drive automation. Your admin can wire workflows to fire as a ticket moves between stages — meaning the system can act on deadline pressure without anyone watching it. Common patterns:

• Auto-escalate when a ticket enters the "Overdue" stage.
• Notify the assigned agent (email, in-app, or both) when a ticket hits "Due in 30m".
• Notify a manager when a ticket reaches "Untouched 3d+".
• Reassign automatically when a ticket sits in an elapsed stage past a threshold.

You don't configure these — your admin does — but it's worth knowing they exist. If a ticket suddenly gets reassigned, escalated, or you get a notification about it, a watchlist trigger may be the reason.

Where you see watchlists as an agent

Open the Ticket Tray widget on your dashboard (or the always-visible tray on Calendar View). You'll see a tab labeled Watchlists with a count badge. The count is the number of your assigned tickets that fall into any active watchlist's stages.

Click the Watchlists tab to see those tickets, grouped by stage, color-coded by urgency.

If the Watchlists tab doesn't appear, you have no tickets currently in any watchlist's tracked range. That's a good sign — none of your work is sitting on a hot deadline right now.

Filter to a specific watchlist or stage

If your account has multiple watchlists (e.g. one for SLA response, one for SLA resolution), you can narrow the view:

• Pick a specific watchlist from the dropdown to see only tickets within that watchlist.
• Pick a specific stage to see only tickets in (for example) the "Overdue" bucket.

Use the deadlines view to prioritize your day

A typical agent workflow:

1. Open the dashboard.
2. Glance at the Watchlists tab. If it has a count, look there first.
3. Address the most-urgent stage (usually the reddest/most-elapsed) before working anything from your normal queue.
4. Move down through the stages.

Watchlists answer the question "of my work, what's most at risk right now?" — without you doing the math.

You don't create watchlists

Watchlists are configured by your admin. If you think a watchlist should exist for some deadline that isn't being tracked (e.g. an internal SLA your team committed to that's not in the system), ask your admin or open a support ticket. You can't add or modify watchlists from the agent panel.

Tip: Make a habit of checking the Watchlists tab first thing each morning and right after lunch. SLA breaches usually happen because someone didn't notice the timer — not because the work was hard. The watchlist is the timer, made visible. Use it.