Ion population which appear out of ionisation balance are often observed in laboratory plasmas. Spatially or temporally, they mark the disequilibrium between atomic processes in the presence of strong certain spectrum line combinations can serve as diagnostic indicators which characterise the dynamic state from an atomic point of view. This paper establishes indicators for two cases, namely (a) transiently ionising ions in low stages of ionisation. This is applied to the impurity influx from the walls and limiters of the JET tokamak (b) transiently recombining highly ionised or stripped ions. This is applied to impurity recombination in the JET plasma in the presence of neutral hydrogen beams.