Why you did not get an intervention
Four throttles sit between a rule being met and an alert reaching you. They are deliberate, and this is what each one does.
What this does
Explains the gap between “my rule was met” and “nothing happened”.
Sentinel reads physiology, and physiology arrives constantly. A watch sends a reading roughly every two seconds. If every reading that crossed a threshold produced an alert, a slightly elevated morning would produce hundreds of them and you would turn the whole thing off by lunchtime. So four gates sit between a rule being met and an alert reaching you, in this order.
1. The 30 second debounce. Rules are evaluated at most once every 30 seconds, however fast the readings arrive. Your heart rate can cross a threshold and come back down inside that window without anything firing.
2. The per-rule cooldown. A rule that has just fired cannot fire again until its cooldown has passed. You set that when you build the rule. Left empty, it defaults to 5 minutes, whatever the severity.
3. The fatigue quota, measured over a rolling 15 minutes. Your own custom rules can deliver 5 info or warning alerts in that window. Critical alerts from a rule you wrote yourself are exempt and are never held back by this quota. Rules that came from a template are held tighter, at 3 info or warning and 2 critical. Once a quota is used up, further alerts of that kind are dropped until the window rolls forward.
4. Content de-duplication, also over 15 minutes. An intervention is skipped if the same rule has already delivered, or if its message is close to one you have just had. Critical alerts are compared only against other criticals, and only on the wording, so a genuine escalation still reaches you even when something similar fired a moment ago.
Five rules meeting their conditions at the same time will not produce five alerts. The first one through delivers and the rest are held, which is the intended behaviour rather than a fault.
Before you start
Work through the ordinary causes before blaming the throttles.
Was a session running? No session means no readings and no evaluation.
Was the rule enabled? A disabled rule stays visible in the list.
Does your device supply that metric? A rule on heart rate variability never fires on a device that does not send beat-to-beat data. A rule on sleep hours never fires if nothing recorded your sleep. See Which heart rate devices work.
Were all the conditions true at once? Conditions combine with AND, so a rule with two of them needs both true in the same reading.
Did it deliver somewhere you were not looking? A voice intervention aimed at a device that is offline is silent on that device. See Where interventions reach you.
What you should see
Every intervention that survives the four gates is written to your history, whatever channel it went out on. That is the place to check. If it is in the history and you did not hear it, the problem is delivery. If it is not in the history, it was either never triggered or it was throttled.
The live card also lists interventions for the current session, and marks them on the chart.
If it doesn’t work
Nothing at all has ever fired. Check the rule was enabled and a session was running. Then confirm the metric it watches is being supplied, which the live card tells you at a glance.
One alert arrived where you expected several. The fatigue quota or the de-duplication gate did its job. This is the intended behaviour.
A critical alert was dropped. Criticals have their own quota, 3 in fifteen minutes for a custom rule and 2 for a template rule. Beyond that they are held.
The rule fires far less often than the threshold suggests. The cooldown. A five-minute cooldown on a condition that stays true all afternoon gives you one alert every five minutes, not a stream.
It fired but you heard nothing. Voice delivery went to a device that was not listening, or push is muted. See Mute intervention notifications.
Related
Related
Still stuck? Email support@vexatrade.ai.