This article walks you through creating a Watchlist in Horizon — using a concrete example: detecting tickets with no activity for 3 or more days and creating a floating todo to remind the technician to call the customer.
Where to find it: Admin Panel → Components → Watchlists
Before the steps, here's the full picture.
A Watchlist monitors a single datetime field across all open tickets. You define a direction — are you counting down to a future deadline, or measuring time since a past event? — and a set of Stages: threshold boundaries that tickets cross as time elapses or a deadline approaches.
Lifecycle Rules are separate objects linked to a watchlist. Each rule targets a specific stage (or all stages) and fires a single action — like creating a todo, triggering triage, or sending a scheduling link — the first time a ticket enters that stage.
The scan runs on a schedule. Each cycle, it finds tickets that have newly crossed into a stage, fires any matching rules, and records the entry so the rule does not fire again for that ticket.
Navigate to Admin Panel → Components → Watchlists and click Create Watchlist.
Click Save.
Under Monitoring:
lastActivityDate (or your helpdesk's equivalent field for last ticket activity)Direction controls how thresholds are interpreted. Approaching counts minutes remaining before a future value; Elapsed counts minutes that have passed since a past value.
Scroll to Stages and click Add Stage.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Label | Stale |
| Threshold (Minutes) | 4320 |
| Color | Warning |
4,320 minutes equals 3 days. A ticket enters the Stale stage the first time the scanner detects that 4,320 or more minutes have elapsed since its last activity date.
You can add multiple stages at different thresholds — for example, a Warning at 4,320 minutes and a Critical at 7,200 (5 days) — each able to trigger its own rules.
Click Save.
Important: When you first activate a watchlist that has Lifecycle Rules attached, the initial scan will fire those rules against every existing ticket that already meets a stage threshold. On a large account, this can mean hundreds of todos created or triage jobs run at once.
Before attaching any Lifecycle Rules, set a Ticket Filter that restricts the watchlist to a small, known set of tickets — for example, a single queue or a specific company. Validate that the rules behave as expected on that limited scope, then broaden the filter once you're confident.
Under Filtering, select a Ticket Filter. Leave it empty only if you have no Lifecycle Rules attached, or if you have explicitly accounted for the full population of matching tickets.
Click Save.
Navigate to Admin Panel → Components → Watchlists → Lifecycle Rules and click Create Lifecycle Rule.
Click Save.
Multiple rules can be attached to the same watchlist and all fire when a ticket enters a matching stage. Rules execute in the order defined by their position.
Navigate to Admin Panel → Components → Watchlists → Scan Logs to see which tickets entered which stages on each scan cycle and whether a workflow was triggered.
When the scanner next runs, any ticket whose last activity date is 3 or more days in the past will enter the Stale stage. A floating todo is created on that ticket — once. Future scans will not re-trigger the rule for tickets already recorded in that stage.