What is a signal?

For: an admin. Takes about 4 minutes.

What this means

A signal is something Stacktic found in your own stack that needs a human decision. It's one of three things:

a gap in accountability;
a stale piece of data;
an access record that doesn't match reality.

A signal is not about whether a vendor's service is up or down. That's what Radar is for. Radar tracks vendor outages that happen to you, and you can't act on an outage. You can only route the notifications and wait it out.

A signal is always something you can act on. You can revoke access, assign an owner, or verify a config. Or you can turn off the check itself if it doesn't fit how you work.

Some examples

Stacktic checks for dozens of conditions. Here are a few common ones:

Ghost access: someone who left the company still has an active login to a tool.
No primary owner: nobody's been made responsible for a tool.
Not enough admins: a tool has only one admin, so a single person leaving would lock everyone else out.
No department: a tool hasn't been tagged with which team owns it.
Verification overdue: an owner was asked to confirm a tool's access list is still accurate, and hasn't.

Each signal names the tool or person it's about. It links straight to the page where you'd fix it.

What you can do with one

Every signal gives you three options:

Fix it. Most signals point you straight to the fix, such as assigning an owner, removing access, or tagging a department. Once the underlying condition clears, the signal resolves on its own.
Snooze it. Not urgent right now? Snooze it for a while. If the condition is still true when the snooze ends, Stacktic fires it again. Snoozing doesn't make it go away for good.
Dismiss it. Use this for a genuine exception, such as a tool where this signal type just doesn't apply. A dismissal is a standing exception for that specific tool. Stacktic stops raising that signal type for it until someone re-enables it.

An Owner can also turn a signal type off for the whole organization, in Settings → Signals. That's different from a dismissal:

a dismissal covers one tool;
turning a signal type off in settings stops it from firing anywhere in your organization.

Your organization may have uploaded its own custom signal definitions (Settings → Signals → Custom signals). Each one has its own on/off switch on that page, separate from the built-in signal types above.

There's also one master switch: the Custom signal card on Settings → Signals itself. Turning that off stops every custom definition at once, whatever each one's own status is.

A custom signal shows up everywhere a built-in one does: the list, the detail page, Slack, and your task list. It uses the title and summary your organization gave it when the definition was written, not a generic label.

Where you'll see them

The /signals page is the dashboard for your whole organization. It has four tabs:

Active: what's open right now;
Snoozed;
Resolved: what's been resolved recently;
Dismissed.

Stacktic also assigns each signal to a person, usually the tool's primary owner. So it shows up on that person's own task list, not just the shared dashboard. Owners, Admins, and Users can all act on a signal: snooze, dismiss, reassign, and fix it.

Suggested fixes

For three signals, Stacktic can often tell who or what the fix should be. It suggests the fix on the signal's page and in its Slack message:

Not enough admins. Stacktic suggests someone the tool itself already lists as an Owner or Admin. It uses the role the tool reported when it last synced. Up to two other people are one click away. Owners come before Admins. Among equals, someone who's already an admin of other tools comes first.
No primary owner. This works the same way, but only for people with a Stacktic login, because a primary owner needs one.
No department. Stacktic suggests a department when at least 3 of the tool's users are in it, and that's at least 60% of the users who have a department.

You'll only see an admin or owner suggestion when the tool is connected and reports roles Stacktic recognises. You'll only see a department suggestion when enough of the tool's users share a department.

The percentage next to a suggestion is a conservative estimate. It shows how often that rule picked what admins actually chose, measured on real decisions.

Nothing happens until you click. Approve makes the change, and the signal clears if that fixes it.