Monitoring overview

Watches detect trademark events you care about. Alerts and webhooks deliver them.

Signa monitoring turns office filings into a feed you can act on. You define what to watch (a specific mark, an owner, a Nice class, a similarity query) and Signa delivers an alert whenever a trademark matches, including the opposition deadline where one applies.

Alerts typically arrive within a day of office publication. Signa evaluates every watch against each office’s daily data update, so a new filing usually alerts within about a day of the office publishing it, not within minutes of the filing itself. Every delivery is one alert at a time (there is no digest or batched mode yet); if you want your own batching, dedupe by the webhook webhook-id header and roll alerts up on your own schedule.

The three building blocks

	What it is	When you touch it
Watch	A saved query. Signa evaluates it against every data update and produces alerts for matches.	When you decide what to track.
Alert	An immutable record of one match. Carries the trademark, the event that triggered it, severity, and a deadline if applicable.	When you process matches in your application.
Webhook	A signed POST to a URL you control, delivered every time an alert fires.	When you want push instead of polling.

You can use webhooks, polling, or both. Webhooks deliver in seconds; polling gives you a recoverable fallback.

The five watch types

Pick from five watch types: mark, portfolio, owner, class, or similarity. See Watches for the full query DSL, the required field for each type, and worked examples.

What an alert looks like

Each alert carries the matched trademark, the event that produced it, a severity, and (where applicable) a jurisdiction-aware opposition deadline. This is the canonical shape returned by GET /v1/alerts/{id} and carried in every webhook delivery:

{
  "id": "alt_8kLm2nPq",
  "object": "alert",
  "schema_version": "2026-06-01",
  "watch": { "id": "wat_7hRt4xQw", "name": "US class 9, new filings", "type": "class" },
  "customer_reference": "matter-2026-0481",
  "event": {
    "type": "trademark.created",
    "summary": "Trademark created",
    "diff": []
  },
  "match": null,
  "trademark": {
    "id": "tm_9pQs3vNk",
    "mark_text": "ACME ROCKETS",
    "mark_feature_type": "word",
    "office_code": "US",
    "status": { "primary": "pending", "stage": "examination" },
    "filing_date": "2026-05-01",
    "registration_date": null,
    "nice_classes": [9],
    "owner_name": "Aurora Digital, Inc.",
    "as_of": "2026-05-08T14:32:11.428Z",
    "links": { "self": "/v1/trademarks/tm_9pQs3vNk" }
  },
  "deadline": {
    "severity": "critical",
    "opposition_window_status": "critical",
    "must_act_by": "2026-05-16T03:59:59.999Z"
  },
  "timestamps": {
    "occurred_at": "2026-05-08T14:30:00.000Z",
    "ingested_at": "2026-05-08T14:31:00.000Z",
    "created_at": "2026-05-08T14:32:11.428Z"
  },
  "links": { "trademark": "/v1/trademarks/tm_9pQs3vNk", "watch": "/v1/watches/wat_7hRt4xQw" }
}

For marks in supported jurisdictions, deadline.opposition_window_status and deadline.must_act_by are computed for you. Route on deadline.severity to escalate the matches that need urgent attention. See Webhooks for the full field reference.

Choosing how alerts reach you

Mode	How it works	Best for
Webhook (push)	Signa posts each alert to a URL you control. HMAC-signed, retried across up to 7 attempts with exponential backoff.	Production workflows, low latency, on-call paging.
Polling (pull)	Your code calls GET /v1/alerts on a schedule.	Prototypes, internal tools, low volume.
Webhook + reconciliation	Push for latency, plus a periodic call to POST /v1/alerts/lookup to confirm nothing was lost.	Production workflows that cannot tolerate a missed alert.

See Handling alerts for the reconciliation pattern.

What’s next

Create your first watch

Pick a watch type, build the query, preview the volume before you go live.

Set up a webhook

Register an endpoint, verify signatures, handle retries and rotation.

Pipe alerts into Slack

A copy-pasteable Cloudflare Worker or AWS Lambda recipe.

Troubleshoot a missing alert

Use the diagnostics endpoint to find out exactly why an alert didn’t fire.