# What CountWatch does

## A watch follows one number

A **watch** follows one count over time: orders, sign-ups, payments, finished jobs. Add a label such as `shop=eu` and each value gets its own watch. CountWatch keeps 90 days of counts.

## It learns what is usual

Each watch learns what is normal for it, hour by hour through the week, so a Monday morning is judged against Monday mornings, not a Saturday night. A new watch learns for about 3 weeks; simple starter rules alert meanwhile. [Bring in past data](/docs/import-history) and alerts start today.

## Three kinds of alert

| Alert | What happened |
|---|---|
| Spike | The number rose far above usual. |
| Drop | The number fell far below usual. |
| Stopped | A source that reports on a schedule went quiet. A source that only sends when something happens shows a stop as a drop. |

## How often it checks

Free checks every hour; Pro checks every 15 minutes.

## Where alerts go

E-mail, Slack, a webhook your agent reads, or PagerDuty on Pro. Each alert says what happened in plain words, for example:

> orders rose to 1,245 in the last hour. Usually about 300 on a Wednesday afternoon.

## You stay in charge

Set your own limit for a watch. Tell CountWatch about a planned sale or deploy (ask your agent), and alerts hold while it runs. If an alert was wrong, press **False alarm**, and CountWatch learns from it for that watch. See [When an alert fires](/docs/rules) and [Planned changes and feedback](/docs/events-and-feedback).