Signals: how Hive catches what is slipping

A signal is something Hive found in your connected tools that is at risk of being missed: an invoice that has gone overdue, a customer email nobody has answered, a deal that has stalled, a metric that has moved well outside its usual range. Each signal explains what happened, why it matters, and what Hive suggests doing next. Signals live on the Signals page in the sidebar (/signals). The page describes itself as “your attention center across connected tools. Hive finds risks, explains why they matter, and proposes the next safe step.”

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What a signal contains

Every signal is built from the same parts, so you can read any of them the same way: Hive never stores the label of the connected account (such as a mailbox address) on the signal itself; the screen resolves which account a signal came from when you open it.

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How Hive finds signals

Hive watches your tools in several complementary ways.

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The always-on loop

Hive runs an hourly loop across every live connector: it collects fresh data, runs detection, and reflects on what it has learned. Some tools also push changes to Hive as they happen through webhooks, and an administrator can start a run immediately with Run loop now on the Signals page (the button also shows when the next scheduled run is due).

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Baselines, not single spikes

For numeric metrics, Hive learns what “normal” looks like for your business using a robust baseline (the median and spread of recent values), then measures how far a new value sits from it. A value only counts as a breach when it is far outside the baseline on at least two of the last three readings, so a single odd data point never raises a signal on its own. The further outside the baseline a value is, the higher its severity.

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A monitoring plan per connector

For each connected tool, Hive writes a monitoring plan: the specific metrics it will read and how it will judge them. Each metric is either a state (is something true right now, such as “invoices overdue”) or a trend (is something moving unusually). Hive dry-runs every read before adding it to the plan, and keeps only reads that return a real number. You can see, pause and edit the plan on the Coverage tab.

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Mail detectors

For Gmail and Outlook, Hive looks for conversations where someone is waiting on you (the last message came from them) and conversations that have gone quiet when you are waiting on someone else. Mail signals carry no address, subject or excerpt in the signal itself; they point you back to the thread.

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Connector-specific detectors

Hive also has detectors built for particular tools, such as invoice collection for Stripe and Xero, deal lifecycle for HubSpot, and stale assigned work for GitHub and Jira. These are rolled out per workspace and are not switched on everywhere by default. See the integrations catalog for what each tool supports.

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Severity and ranking

Severity is High, Medium or Low. Hive ranks the feed by:

1. Stage — what needs you comes first (see below).
2. Severity — high before medium before low.
3. A priority score that combines severity, confidence and blast radius — how much the affected customer, deal or account is worth to the business, based on what the Business Brain knows.

How recently and how often a signal has recurred can lift its score, but never becomes the leading factor.

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Stages

Every signal sits in one stage, shown as a label on the row: When a condition clears by itself (the invoice gets paid), Hive closes the signal for you.

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Noise control: gating, grouping and fatigue

A signal only reaches the feed after it passes an alert gate. It must be urgent, actionable, visible to you, not already covered by another signal, and not a type your team has shown to be noise. Signals whose action would have a high blast radius (B3 or B4) always go to a person.

• De-duplication. If Hive detects the same situation again, it updates the existing signal instead of creating a new one. The row then reads, for example, “seen 2m ago · 47th time · first raised 9d ago”.
• Grouping. When several related signals fire together (an alert storm), Hive shows one row with a count instead of many rows.
• Cooldown. Hive does not re-notify about the same thing repeatedly, but breaks the cooldown early if the severity gets worse.
• Alert fatigue. If your team dismisses a type of signal at least 80% of the time across at least five signals in the last 14 days, Hive stops notifying about that type. This lifts on its own as those dismissals age out. See Triage signals for how each dismissal reason teaches Hive.

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Evidence and provenance

Each reading names its source connector and field, and can show the baseline it was compared against. Comparisons are labelled in plain words — “past your threshold”, “against your usual”, “corroborated”, “correlated” or “cited” — so you can tell a measured breach from a supporting observation. Source links always point to the original record over a secure link and never contain credentials.

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What happens when you disconnect a tool

When someone disconnects an account, Hive stands down the open signals that account was feeding and removes their pending approvals. Nothing that was already approved is undone.

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