Work item notifications and reminders for Azure DevOps
CatLight will show notifications about new work items(tasks and bugs) on your desktop. It will also notify you about work item changes for the queries that you monitor. It will display an alert when you get a new task, or an important issue appears.
The CatLight icon will change from green to blue, yellow, or red when you have new or important issues. You can define the severity for each work item query. This will remind developers that they need to check the issue, even if they missed the notification.
How to configure work item notifications?
1. Get CatLight app
Download CatLight. The app works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
2. Connect to Azure DevOps
Click on "Start new configuration", and select Azure DevOps connection. Provide the url of the account where you want to monitor work items, issues, and bugs.
3. Select queries to monitor
CatLight can monitor work items in multiple Azure DevOps projects and accounts at the same time. You can later share the monitoring settings with the team, so each developer does not need to configure this individually.
4. Get desktop notifications
CatLight will show a desktop notification when a new work item matches the query, or one of your work items is updated by another person.
The screenshot above shows a notification on Windows, and it will look similar on macOS and Linux. Your whole team can stay aware, regardless of the platform that they are on.
CatLight benefits for issue monitoring
A better alternative to email task notifications
Compared to email notifications, CatLight saves your time by focusing on the current state, and not the history of changes. Developers can get too many work item notification emails, and will start ignoring them after a while. Unlike emails, CatLight keeps reminding engineers about pending work items with a tray status icon, until they complete them.
Work item status dashboard
CatLight can show the status of work items that you want to monitor. It will also show the personalized status of release pipelines, build pipelines, and pull requests. You can create multiple dashboards and share them with the team.
The default dashboard has two panels:
- Action list, which includes all work items that need your attention.
- Watch list that will show issues that you have created for other people, and that you are currently blocked on.
Working-on notifications
When your team member starts working on the issue, he can click on the "start work" button in the app to notify you about it. The app will show you a desktop notification about it. You can also see if someone is working on your issue right now on the CatLight dashboard.
Improve team productivity
CatLight improves the productivity of the whole engineering team. It can help to move the work faster and reduce distractions for developers. Read more about use cases for developers, and benefits for managers.
Who is using CatLight for issue monitoring?
CatLight is used by leading large and small companies to get issue reminders. See the list of top users and their testimonials.
CatLight is a top app on Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace , with over 40,000 installs and 4.5/5 rating.
Monitor builds, releases, and pull requests
CatLight can also:
- Monitor continuous integration builds for Azure DevOps
- Monitor continuous delivery pipelines for Azure DevOps
- Get pull request reminders for Azure DevOps