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Activity Monitor

The Activity Monitor is the live view of everything automating right now — which macros are running, which step each run is on, what is queued behind them, and which timers and prompts are still pending. Every one of those can be stopped from this page.

It answers the question you have when a site is misbehaving and you do not yet know which automation is responsible: what is running?

Overview​

The page is push-driven. The server sends a complete snapshot whenever automation state moves, so the view updates as runs start, advance and finish without polling. Elapsed times tick locally, which matters for the case you most care about — a macro wedged on a single long step emits no events, and a frozen clock would hide exactly the run you are hunting for.

The indicator at the top left shows whether the live feed is attached. Refresh forces a re-read, and the page also re-reads every 15 seconds as a safety net and re-attaches the feed automatically after a reconnect.

Summary​

Five counters across the top:

  • Running — runs currently executing, across all macros
  • Stopping — runs that have been told to abort but have not finished unwinding. A run that sits here is ignoring its abort signal, usually because a step is blocked on something that does not watch it
  • Queued — invocations parked behind an in-flight run, waiting their turn
  • Timers — named macro timers armed and not yet fired
  • Prompts — Ask prompts nobody has answered yet

Macro Runs​

Each macro with work in flight gets a card. The header carries its name (click to open the macro in a reference modal over this page, so the feed keeps running underneath; if the row is gone you land on the Macros page instead), its concurrency policy, an elevated badge where applicable, and its timeout if one is set.

Each run below shows:

  • Which step, by number and label, with a progress bar across the macro's steps
  • Elapsed time, counting up from when the run started
  • What started it — the trigger, schedule, UI or user the run was caused by. A trigger or schedule badge is clickable and opens that trigger or schedule in the reference modal; a site mode or timer cause is plain text
  • dry run, where the run is a simulation
  • stopping, with the reason, once an abort has been signalled

Runs that have been going longer than their macro's timeout — or longer than five minutes where no timeout is set — are tinted so they stand out.

Stopping a run​

Stop on a run aborts that run alone. For a macro using the parallel policy this matters: several runs of the same macro are in flight at once, and stopping one leaves the others alone. Stop All n appears when a macro has more than one run and stops every one of them.

Stopping aborts the run where it stands. Steps already taken are not undone — a macro that turned on six lights and was stopped on the seventh leaves those six on.

Queued invocations​

When a macro is invoked while one of its runs is in flight, what happens next is set by its concurrency policy. Under the default queue policy every invocation executes in turn, so a burst leaves invocations parked. The card shows how many, and Drop n Queued discards them without running them.

This is the other half of stopping a runaway macro. A trigger feedback loop parks thousands of invocations; stopping the active run simply hands the macro to the next one in line. To actually halt it: drop the queue, then stop the run. Dropping a queue affects only the invocations waiting at that moment — the macro can be invoked again normally afterwards.

Pending Timers​

Named timers armed by a start_timer step, with the macro each will run (click the name to open it) and the time remaining. Cancel disarms one; the macro it would have run does not run. Timers marked persistent survive a restart.

Unanswered Prompts​

Ask prompts waiting for an answer, with the macro each is holding (click the name to open it). A macro blocked on a prompt is not going to finish until somebody answers it or it times out, which is a common explanation for a run that appears stuck. Cancel releases the prompt and the waiting macro resumes as though it had been dismissed.

Stop All​

Stop All in the toolbar aborts every run in flight and drops every queue, across all macros. It reports which macros it stopped and, if any refused, which.

Two things it does not do:

  • It does not undo the side effects of steps that already ran.
  • It does not disable anything. Schedules and triggers stay enabled, so anything scheduled will run again at its next fire. If a macro needs to stay off, disable the macro, schedule or trigger itself.

Permissions​

The whole page is admin-only, including the stop verbs, and it is one of the few surfaces a by-name grant cannot open — a non-elevated session is refused outright rather than shown a filtered view. A macro marked elevated stays admin-only to interfere with, in the same way it is admin-only to run or to edit.

Disabling a macro removes it from the system's live collection but does not stop a run already in progress. The monitor tracks runs through the macro engine directly rather than that collection, so a run stays visible and stoppable here even after its macro has been disabled.

  • Macros — authoring macros and their concurrency policies
  • Macro Schedules — time-based execution
  • Triggers — attribute-driven execution
  • Roles — who may watch this page and use its stop verbs