Monitoring with Watchlists

The Agent Watchlist (Right Sidebar) is your primary high-fidelity tool for monitoring the health, activity, and thoughts of your agent swarm.

🕵️ Real-Time Monitoring

Status Indicators

Every agent in the watchlist has a distinct status light:

• Emerald (Idle): Ready for a new task.
• Cyan (Processing): Currently executing or thinking.
• Amber (Action Needed): Waiting for user confirmation or a tool prompt.
• Gray (Off): Session is paused or hibernating.
• Red (Error): Encountered a fatal process error.

Live Thought Bubbles

Wardian captures the agent's internal telemetry and displays it as a "Thought Bubble" next to the agent's name. This allows you to see what the agent is currently working on without reading the full terminal log.

📊 Customizable Columns

Click the gear icon (⚙) in the watchlist header to open the column picker. Each column can be toggled on or off independently:

Column	Default	Description
Status	On	Current agent status label
Query Count	On	Number of prompts sent this session
Uptime	Off	Time since the agent process started
Provider / Model	Off	Provider name and model identifier
Last Queried	On	Time elapsed since the last prompt was sent

Sorting

Click any column header to sort by that column. Clicking again cycles through ascending → descending → unsorted. The Agent column header sorts alphabetically by name. Sorting applies on top of your custom watchlist order; drag-to-reorder still works when no sort is active.

Persistence

Column visibility and sort state are saved to <wardian-home>/watchlists/prefs.json and restored on next launch.

The CLI can inspect persisted watchlist and team state without starting the desktop app:

wardian team list
wardian team show <team-name-or-id>
wardian watchlist list
wardian watchlist show <watchlist-name-or-id>

These commands read the same watchlists/index.json file as the GUI and accept both the current v2 state shape with global teams and legacy flat watchlist arrays. They are read-only; team mutation and team send targeting are planned as separate CLI slices.

🗂️ Organizing with Watchlists

As your swarm grows, a single list becomes difficult to manage. Wardian allows you to group agents into custom Watchlists.

Creating a Watchlist

1. Click the + icon at the top of the Right Sidebar.
2. Give your list a name (e.g., "Frontend Ops").
3. Your new list will appear as a tab or filter in the roster.

Managing Agents

• Reordering: Drag and drop agent cards within a watchlist to prioritize your view.
• Filtering: Click a watchlist tab to focus only on that group of agents.
• Bulk Selection: Use Ctrl+Click to select multiple agents within a watchlist for broadcast commands.
• Bulk Context Menu: If you right-click inside the current multi-selection, the menu applies to the whole selection. Bulk delete shows one confirmation dialog for the full selected set instead of prompting once per agent.

🖱️ Remote Management

Hover over any agent in the Roster to access instant control icons:

• Pause/Resume: Suspend the PTY process to save CPU.
• Restart: Re-spawn the agent with its initial instructions.
• Quick-Jump: Double-click an agent to center the main Grid view on that agent's terminal.

Related Research

• Dashboard Observability References