What Are Customer Ops Alerts?

Theator continuously monitors the health of recording equipment in your operating rooms. When something goes wrong — a video cable gets unplugged, a unit goes offline, or a mobile cart stays offline for days — the system automatically creates an incident and notifies your team so you can respond quickly.

Alerts are designed to protect recording coverage: the more quickly you respond, the fewer cases are missed or partially recorded.

How Alerts Work

1. Detection — Theator's monitoring system detects an equipment issue. The two room alerts (Cable Disconnected and Unit Offline) are raised only once a scheduled case has passed its booked end time without being fully recorded — equipment that is faulty but has cost you no recording does not alert. Because the timing follows the booked slot rather than the actual surgery, a case running long may still be in progress when the alert arrives. The condition must also persist across consecutive checks, so a transient state that resolves itself never reaches you.
2. Incident Created — A PagerDuty incident is created and appears in your Incidents Dashboard at System > Monitoring > Overview.
3. Notification — Your team receives a push notification with the alert details, including the affected room and unit.
4. Response — A team member acknowledges the alert, goes to the room to investigate, and fixes the issue.
5. Resolution — The team member resolves the incident in the dashboard and adds a note about what was done.

Watch: Incident Lifecycle in Action

This short walkthrough shows the full lifecycle: spotting an alert on the Incidents Dashboard, opening the detail drawer, acknowledging it, and resolving with a note.

Alert Lifecycle

Every alert goes through three states:

The Incidents Dashboard shows all active alerts (triggered and acknowledged) at the top, and resolved alerts in a collapsible section below.

Alert Types

Theator automatically raises 3 types of equipment alerts:

Looking for No Video Signal or No Unit Present? These are no longer separate alerts. A connected cable with no video is reported as Cable Disconnected, and a missing or unplugged unit is reported as Unit Offline.

Pedal (Clicker) Status

Theator does not currently raise an alert when a foot pedal disconnects. To check pedal status, open System > Monitoring, select the Rooms tab, and switch to By Unit. A red dot in the Pedal column, with the tooltip Foot pedal expected but not connected, means the pedal is disconnected. Recording is not affected. Pedal Disconnected incidents raised in the past can still appear among your resolved incidents.

What to Do When You Receive an Alert

Every alert follows the same general response flow:

1. Acknowledge the alert in the Incidents Dashboard — this lets your team know you're handling it.
2. Check the Monitoring pages — go to System > Monitoring > Rooms > By Unit to see the current status and identify the affected room.
3. Go to the room — physically investigate and fix the issue.
4. Verify the fix — check the Monitoring pages to confirm the issue is resolved.
5. Resolve the alert — close the incident in the dashboard and add a note about what you found and did.

Each alert type has a detailed troubleshooting guide with step-by-step instructions. You can access it directly from the incident detail drawer by clicking View Troubleshooting Guide.

Troubleshooting Guides

• Cable Disconnected (URGENT) — Troubleshooting Guide
• Unit Offline — Troubleshooting Guide
• Pedal / Clicker Disconnected — Troubleshooting Guide — no alert is raised; use it when the Pedal indicator is red
• No Video Signal / No Unit Present — Troubleshooting Guide — hands-on checks behind Cable Disconnected and Unit Offline alerts
• Cart Long-Term Offline — Troubleshooting Guide

Related Articles

• Getting Started with the Incidents Dashboard — Learn how to use the dashboard to manage alerts
• System Monitoring Dashboard — Overview of all monitoring pages
• Daily Monitoring Checklist — Quick daily routine for biomed technicians and Clinical Engineers