4 — Source panel

The source panel — the leftmost column in the Tempo window — lists every source Tempo knows about and gives you the controls for showing, hiding, filtering, and re-colouring each one. It’s the closest thing Tempo has to a global navigator: where the event panel shows what’s happening, the source panel shows who’s talking.

This chapter walks through the UI element by element and explains what each one means, so the badges and controls stop being decoration and start being information.

4.1 — Source rows and badges

A source row is a horizontal strip with four parts, left to right:

●   Source name              ⚡ 12     ⓘ

• The colour dot on the left identifies the source. It’s also the source’s accent colour — the tint Tempo applies to event cards from this source in the feed. Click the dot to open the system colour picker. Note that the dot is one role; the left-edge stripe on each event card is a separate signal whose meaning you can switch in Settings → Interface: by default the stripe reflects severity (green / yellow / red), but you can flip it to source and have the stripe match this dot instead
• The source name is the human-readable label. For bundled sources it defaults to the provider’s canonical name (“Kopia”, “UniFi”, “Home Assistant”). For custom sources you can rename it in Manage Sources
• The priority badge on the right is the at-a-glance status — described in detail below
• The info button (ⓘ) on the far right opens the source actions menu — also described below

The priority badge

The badge collapses three independent signals into one compact widget. Reading it correctly is the difference between glancing at the source panel and understanding the source panel.

The three signals:

The combinations you’ll actually see:

A row with no badge is fine and quiet. A red badge with a number is the row your eye should land on first.

🛠 Tip: hover over the badge to see a tooltip that spells out exactly what each channel is reporting for that specific source. The same explanation lives in Settings → Help, in case you’d rather have it as a reference.

Hidden sources

If you’ve hidden a source (see §4.4 below), its row stays in the source panel but renders dimmed: the colour dot is at 35% opacity, the name is in tertiary text colour, and badges are halved in opacity. A hidden source contributes no events to the feed and no segments to the heatmap — Tempo treats it as if it didn’t exist for the duration of the hide.

The row stays visible so you can un-hide easily; it isn’t gone, just muted.

4.2 — Liveness signal

The bolt ⚡ icon on the badge answers a simple question: is this source still talking to me, or has it gone silent?

A source is live when it has emitted at least one event within its liveness window. The default window is 24 hours (1 day) but you can override it globally and per-source in Settings → Maintenance → Liveness.

Sources go silent for legitimate and illegitimate reasons:

• Legitimate: a Kopia repo only runs nightly, so it’s silent during the day; an Apple Calendar with no upcoming entries is genuinely empty
• Illegitimate: an upstream tool crashed; a webhook URL changed and you forgot to update it; the LAN connection between your Mac and the upstream host dropped

The bolt is a passive signal — Tempo doesn’t probe sources; it just notices when they stop being chatty. A missing bolt isn’t a guaranteed alarm, it’s a hint.

💡 Note: V1 only does passive liveness (silence detection). Active liveness (Tempo periodically pinging the upstream tool to confirm it’s reachable) is on the V1.1+ roadmap. If you have a source that’s expected to be silent for long stretches, set its per-source liveness window high enough that the bolt doesn’t disappear during normal quiet periods.

Tuning the liveness threshold

In Settings → Maintenance → Liveness you’ll find:

• A global default — the threshold applied to every source unless overridden
• A per-source override list — pick a source, set a different threshold

Common thresholds:

• 1 hour for chatty monitors (Uptime Kuma probes, real-time webhooks)
• 6 hours for hourly cron jobs
• 1 day (default) for nightly backups — Kopia running at the same time every night keeps its bolt lit indefinitely
• 3 days for weekly maintenance scripts that check in every few days
• 7 days for genuinely weekly cycles (a renewal job, a curated digest)

If a source goes silent and the bolt disappears, that’s the source telling you something. Whether it’s a problem depends on the source.

4.3 — Source filtering and the filter banner

Filtering goes through the source’s info menu (ⓘ), not by clicking the row. Open the menu and pick “Show only this source” to filter the timeline down to that one source. Two visual changes happen:

1. The chosen source row gets a slight highlight in the source panel (its background fills in)
2. A yellow filter banner appears across the top of the event panel, naming the filtered source(s): “Filtered: UniFi · Kopia · click to clear”

Click the banner to clear the filter and return to the full feed (or use the menu’s “Show all sources” entry on any source).

Multi-source filters

To filter to multiple sources at once:

1. Open the info menu (ⓘ) on the first source and click “Show only this source”
2. Open the info menu (ⓘ) on each additional source you want to include and click “Add to filter”

The filter banner lists all the sources, separated by ·. Clear it the same way: click the banner, or use the menu’s “Show all sources” entry on any source.

🛠 Tip: filter is a visualisation setting, not a state change. Filtering doesn’t ack or dismiss anything; it just hides events from the view. Acking and dismissing happen via the action panel buttons or per-source auto-rules.

What the filter affects

The heatmap intentionally ignores the filter. The reasoning: the heatmap is your temporal awareness surface. If you’ve filtered to UniFi but a critical Kopia event lit up an hour ago, you should still see that hour glowing red on the strip.

4.4 — Source actions menu

The info button (ⓘ) on each source row opens a context menu with the controls that aren’t worth taking up permanent UI real estate:

Source actions
──────────────────────────
Show only this source
Add to filter            ▸ (or "Remove from filter" if already in)
Show all sources         ▸ (greyed out if no filter active)
──────────────────────────
Hide from timeline       ▸ (or "Show in timeline" if already hidden)
──────────────────────────
Show history…

Colour is set elsewhere — click the source’s coloured dot directly (system colour picker), or open the source’s score in the Score Editor, where it sits next to the display name and the rest of the source-level configuration.

Show only / Add to filter / Show all

These are the filter controls described in §4.3 — they live in this menu because filtering is a deliberate action, not something the source row should trigger by accident on a stray click. The menu’s labels adapt to the current state:

• If there’s no active filter: “Show only this source” is the primary entry
• If this source is already part of an active filter: “Remove from filter” appears
• If this source is not in the active filter: “Add to filter” and “Show only this source” both appear
• “Show all sources” clears the filter; greyed when no filter is active

Hide from timeline

Hiding makes a source disappear from the event feed and the heatmap, but keeps the source row in the source panel (dimmed). The badge still updates — you can see at a glance that a hidden source is generating events — but the events themselves don’t clutter your feed.

Hiding is the right move for:

• A source you don’t currently care about but might un-hide later (a noisy CI workflow during a refactor that you’ll want back when you’re shipping again)
• A source from another household member that you only check occasionally
• A source whose events are useful to count but not to read (a Hazel rule firing on every download — you want to know it’s working, but you don’t need to see every fire)

To completely remove a source, use Manage Sources instead — that one fully forgets the source rather than just muting it.

Show history

Opens the source history sheet — a separate window showing this source’s activity over the past 84 days as a GitHub-contribution-style heatmap grid. Each cell is one day, coloured by the maximum severity of that day’s events.

The 84-day window is what the visualisation renders, not what Tempo retains. The full event database keeps everything indefinitely, subject to your retention policy in Settings → Maintenance → Database.

The history sheet is read-only — you can hover over any cell to see a tooltip with that day’s count and severity breakdown, but you can’t edit or dismiss events from this view. To act on a specific day’s events, close the history sheet, navigate to that day in the main timeline (using the date picker at the top of the event panel), and act from there.

For sources organised under an umbrella parent — UniFi grouping Network and Protect, Apple grouping Calendar and Reminders, Scripts grouping its languages — the history sheet is per concrete sub-source, not per umbrella. Opening Show history on UniFi Protect shows only Protect events; Network’s history is its own sheet.

🛠 Tip: source history is the answer to “did anything weird happen with this backup last weekend?” or “is this source generating more noise this month than last?”. A glance at the heatmap pattern often answers these questions faster than scrolling through cards.

Manage Sources

The button at the bottom of the source panel switches the panel into Manage Sources mode. The label adapts:

• “Get started — add a source” when you have one or two sources (you’ve just installed Tempo)
• “Add a source” when you have three or four
• “Manage sources” when you have five or more

Manage Sources is its own view — same column, different content. From there you can:

• Add a new source (which mostly means installing or authoring a score and pointing the upstream tool at Tempo’s ingestion endpoint)
• Reorder existing sources (drag rows to re-rank them — order in the source panel is purely visual but matters for muscle memory)
• Edit per-source settings: display name, group membership, auto-dismiss override, liveness override
• Remove a source entirely (forgets it; events from that source stop being ingested)

A yellow accent line near the button highlights the transition, so when you’re switching between the active list and the manage view your eye lands in the same place.

Where to go from here

• Customising what events look like in the feed → §5 — Event panel
• Editing the score for a source → §7 — Score Editor
• Tuning auto-rules per source → §8.4 — Maintenance settings
• Adding a new source from scratch → §10 — Sources reference