Creation and modification of observations are the triggers that can initiate the checking of observation monitoring rules. These triggers are mutually exclusive, i.e. whenever an observation is created only the creation trigger will fire, whenever an observation is modified only the modification trigger will fire.

Each observation monitoring definition defines to which triggers it will respond.

Whenever a observation is created or modified the system will check if observation monitoring is globally enabled and if observation monitoring is enabled for the feature the observation belongs to. If both of these conditions are true the system will search for all active observation monitoring definitions that respond to the creation or modification trigger and will initiate the checking of those rules.