CatLight can monitor work items (tasks & bugs) in a TFS/VSTS project. It will notify you about the changes and show the current status in tray.

You can use existing work item queries to select tasks and bugs that you want to monitor. Choose one of two modes:

• Show all - use this for queries that should return empty result when everything is OK, and for queues of short-term work. For example: “Important open bugs”, “Urgent tasks”, “Bugs to verify today”, “Bugs to review”.
• Show changes - use this to track changes in long-term queues of work, like “My tasks”,

By default, CatLight can show you a lot of notifications, so that you can see how the app works.

To change this, go to the edit menu/settings.

For long-term use you can make the following changes

• Notifications
  • Choose "My Builds" to see less notifications. You can still see the statuses of all monitored builds in the  tray.
  • Uncheck "Show notifications when I change a work item"
• Dashboard
  • Check "Don't show work item changes that I made myself"
• Branches
  • Choose "Track My Branches"

By default, CatLight will poll your server every minute to check for updates. You can configure push notifications using webhooks for Azure DevOps, TFS, and Jenkins. After that CatLight app will significantly reduce polling frequency, and check for changes when it receives the push notification. You can expect to get notifications about 10x faster and reduce your server load by about 30x.

Next steps:

Configure accelerated notifications for Azure DevOps/TFS

Configure accelerated notifications for Jenkins

By default, CatLight will poll your server every minute to check for updates. For Azure DevOps/TFS, you can configure push notifications using webhooks. After that CatLight app will significantly reduce polling frequency, and check for changes when it receives the push notification. You can expect to get notifications about 10x faster and reduce your server load by about 30x.

How to enable accelerated notifications

• Install the CatLight Azure DevOps extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace
• Go to Azure DevOps web UI. Every project should now have "CatLight" hub on the left. 

• In the CatLight hub, click on "Enable accelerated notifications".

By default, CatLight will poll your server every minute to check for updates. For Azure DevOps/TFS, you can configure push notifications using webhooks. After that CatLight app will significantly reduce polling frequency, and check for changes when it receives the push notification. You can expect to get notifications about 10x faster and reduce your server load by about 30x.

How to enable accelerated notifications

• Install the CatLight Jenkins plugin.
• Go to Jenkins web UI, and click on the CatLight link in the left bar. 

• Click on the "global settings" link, set a CatLight team id in Jenkins settings, and save

You can use wildcards and extglob expressions to filter items on the dashboard.

Syntax:

• * - matches any number of characters
• ? - matches a single character
• […] - matches any of the enclosed characters. For example: [a-z] , [a-d1-9]
• ?(pattern-list) - Matches zero or one occurrence of the given patterns. pattern-list is a list of one or more patterns separated by a ‘|’. 
• *(pattern-list) - Matches zero or more occurrences of the given patterns.
• +(pattern-list) - Matches one or more occurrences of the given patterns.
• @(pattern-list)  - Matches one of the given patterns.
• !(pattern-list) - Matches anything except one of the given patterns

Examples:

• MyProject*Build

CatLight can show the status of your team members 

For every user, this report will show the number of items in different states on their dashboards.

To add this report, go to teams menu > show team status.