Monitors in Distil Diagnostics

Monitors in Distil Diagnostics let your team track how a single restaurant service is performing against your targets (Expectations) over time. Where the Forecast view shows the picture for an upcoming week, a Monitor pins that picture in place and follows it day by day, so you can see whether the actions you take are moving the needle.

Monitors help teams answer questions such as: Did the marketing campaign we ran for next Friday's dinner service actually shift bookings? Are the operational changes at one venue closing the gap to Expectation? Across the whole portfolio, how many extra covers and how much extra revenue have our actions delivered?

Monitors are part of the engine that powers Distil Diagnostics. You can find out more about their companions, Forecasting and Availability Scanning, in the related articles.

How Monitors work

A Monitor is created against a specific restaurant, week and service. At the moment of creation, Distil records the original forecast and your Expectation (read more about Setting Expectations here). From that point on, the algorithm re-forecasts every day and the Monitor builds up a timeline showing how the week is taking shape; what was predicted, what's actually happening, and how the two are converging.

Historical Monitors remain available after the week has finished, so past initiatives like marketing campaigns, operational changes, reservations pushes can be reviewed to demonstrate consistency or improvement over time.

Using Monitors to get better results

Imagine you're planning two weeks ahead. You're reviewing the Forecast in Distil Diagnostics for Week 43, and one restaurant immediately stands out: Restaurant A is flagged red, with the current trajectory nowhere near your Expectation.

Instead of waiting for the week to arrive and hoping for the best, you can get ahead of it. You set up a Monitor, agree a plan with the team, and a marketing campaign goes live. In the Monitor, the Daily Re-Forecast Chart starts to tell the story:

Are pre-booked actuals beginning to close the gap to Expectation?

Is the forecast lifting as the campaign gains traction?

Are walk-ins on Day 0 onwards higher than the forecast predicted?

If the answer is yes, that's more than a gut feeling, you've got proof. A screenshot of the Monitor Details panel, a timeline, and a clear link between forward planning and real revenue impact. At the end of the period, the improvement summary in the top right of the Monitors view sums it up for the whole portfolio.

Monitor List View

The Monitors List view brings every restaurant service you're tracking into a single structured timeline. Each row shows the original forecast at the time the Monitor was created, your Expectation, and how things have evolved including change in forecast, tracked days, actual covers and revenue.

In the top right, a snapshot shows the additional covers and revenue generated across your Monitors from the selected range. This makes measurable ROI instantly visible, which is useful when central teams need to demonstrate the value of insight-led activity in marketing, reservations and operations to wider stakeholders.

Filters at the top let you narrow by restaurant, creator, service or forecast status, and the Covers / Revenue toggle switches the displayed metric across the whole view.

By default, you will see your live monitors on the Monitor’s landing page. You can explore historical monitors by clicking the arrow next to the date range, which will open the calendar where you can select a specific week or a week range.

Click any column header to sort the full list; change in forecast to surface the biggest movers, tracked days to focus on Monitors with more (or less) history behind them, or actuals to scan the realised results.

Monitor Details Panel

Click any row in the Monitors List view to open the Monitor Details panel. At the top of the panel, two summary tiles compare the Initial Forecast and Latest Forecast against your Expectation, answering the most important question at a glance: is the picture getting better or worse since the Monitor started?

Each Monitor has its own UTM Campaign Code in the Monitor Details header. Click on the code to copy to your clipboard. Use it as the utm_campaign parameter in marketing activity so the resulting traffic and conversions are attributed back to that specific Monitor.

Below the tiles, the Daily Re-Forecast Chart shows a timeline of how the monitored week is building up. Performance can be tracked from 35 days before the week begins all the way through to Day 6 of the live week, with Day 0 marking the start of the monitored week. The chart always shows this full range, no matter when the Monitor was created, so that you can easily understand where you are in the build-up, what's already happened, and how things are currently performing.

The Expectation is the flat line at the top: your target for the week, and the finishing line you want both Forecast and Actuals to cross.

Each day is shown as a pair of bars: the total forecast on one side, actuals on the other. The total forecast combines Distil's À la carte forecast with group bookings already in the books, including unconfirmed ones. Actuals show your pre-booked À la carte and group reservations during the build-up; from Day 0 onwards, they also include completed covers.

If the bars grow day on day and start to exceed forecast as the week approaches, that's a strong signal your activity is working.

Expectation is a flat line representing the target for the week. Think of it as the finishing line you want both Forecast and Actuals to cross.

The table below the chart drills into the same data day by day, surfacing the detail behind each bar. Alongside the headline forecast and actuals, it breaks out the underlying numbers that shape them. The details include expected and realised cancellations and no-shows, which are excluded from the chart totals but are useful for understanding why a day is tracking the way it is.

Each column represents one day of the build-up, with the Initial Forecast highlighted on the left and the Latest Forecast on the right. The rows are grouped into four sections: Expectation, Expectation vs Forecast, Forecast Breakdown, and Actual Covers; so you can move from "what's the gap?" down to "what's driving it?" in a single view.

Two ways to create a monitor

A Monitor can be created from the Forecast view or directly from the Capacity Report, whichever fits your workflow.

From the Forecast view, open Forecast from the sub-menu, find the restaurant and service you want to watch, and select Create Monitor at the end of the service row. This is the right starting point when scanning forward and spotting services where the forecast is drifting away from Expectation. Typically two or three weeks ahead of service, when there's still time for marketing, reservations or operational interventions to have an effect.

From the Capacity Report, a Create Monitor link sits next to the day and date in the header. One click creates a Monitor for the restaurant, week and service currently being viewed. Useful when a capacity issue is spotted in the Availability Scan and you want to track it without breaking your flow. 

Once a Monitor exists for that restaurant, date and service, the link switches to View Monitor and opens the Monitor Details panel directly over the Capacity Report. Learn more about the Capacity Report in Availability Scanning in Distil Diagnostics.