Alerts and monitoring in SEO
Alerts are essential in SEO if you are working on a project associated with website monitoring, quality assurance, non-regression tests, or if you are interested in automating certain aspects of your regular auditing.
Oncrawl allows you to customize alerts that are triggered at the end of an analysis.
The conditions for triggering an alert are associated with a crawl profile and based on crawl metrics.
You can receive these alerts outside of the Oncrawl platform.
To set up a monitoring system with alerts, you will need to schedule regular crawls in order to be able to detect deviations for a given metric or set of metrics.
Alerting tasks in a project
You can find current alerts on the project home page, under the Tasks section at the top of the page.
If you don't have any alerts set up, this is where you can create a new one using the Create an alert button.
Using the Alerts tab in the Tasks table
Hover over the tab name to see how many alerts have been triggered recently.
This tab contains a table with seven (7) columns that can be sorted and filtered. By default, it is sorted by the alerts that were most recently checked.
Active / Inactive toggle. If the indicator is green, the alert will be checked and might trigger when a crawl with the associated crawl profile is run.
Alert name (can be sorted alphabetically)
Last alert status shows the result of the most recent check for this alert:
Triggered
Not triggered
Error: The alert could not be checked. Often this means that the required information to check the alert was not available in the crawl. Show/Edit details for more information.
N/A or No data: hover over this text for more information. This usually occurs if crawls that checked this alert are archived, or if no crawl has checked this alert yet.
Last checked (can be sorted by ascending or descending date order) shows the last time the alert was checked.
Dates are listed with the following format: May 07, 2024 09:14
Created at shows the date when the alert was created.
Dates are listed with the following format: May 07, 2024 09:14
Crawl profile shows the crawl profile associated with the alert.
Click on the icon to show the settings for this crawl profile.
Show/edit details opens the history of checks for this alert, their details, and the alert editor.
The three dots open menu with two options:
Duplicate the alert.
Delete the alert.
Viewing recently triggered alerts
Use the filters to show specific types of alert status, such as only showing triggered alerts:
Creating an alert
Click the Create an alert button to create a new alert.
Using the template library
Choose Template to create an alert based on a template from Oncrawl's library of frequently monitored elements.
Click Confirm to go to the template library:
Choose the template you want to use, and click on the Use this template in its card.
Choose a crawl profile
Choose a crawl profile to associate this alert with. This is important because a crawl profile will determine the metrics available and the pages that are going to be analyzed. It is highly recommended that you chose a crawl profile that is scheduled to run regularly.
Check the alert definition
The template provides an OQL (Oncrawl Query Language) that targets a specific element.
By default, Oncrawl will examine the number of pages found:
Within the set of pages known by Oncrawl
And that match matching the OQL.
View the alert applied to previous crawls
Click Show preview to see how the alert would have been evaluated over any past crawls.
Use the dropdown menu above the graphic to change the date range displayed here.
Set the trigger threshold
Determine when the alert should trigger by setting how many matching pages create a situation you want to know about. You can see how this compares to past crawl results on the Preview graph.
Determine who and how to notify if the alert triggers
By default, the owner of the current workspace will be notified by email if an alert triggers. You can change this behavior by setting different notification information.
You can set notifications by:
Email
Slack webhook
Teams webhook
Change the name and description of the alert
Optionally, click the edit icon beside the name of the alert at the top of the page to make changes:
Confirm the creation of the alert
Click Create in the upper right-hand corner to create this alert. It will immediately be active.
Manually creating an alert
You can choose to skip the template library and create an alert based on a custom OQL filter by choosing the Manually option.
The process remains the same:
Choose a crawl profile to determine the pages and metrics that will be analyzed.
Set an OQL filter that will match some of the pages to be analyzed.
Preview the way this alert would have been checked for previous crawls.
Set the threshold (the number of matching pages) at which this alert will trigger for future analyses.
Determine who should be notified, and how.
Change the name of the alert.
Create the alert. It will immediately be active.
Editing an alert
Clicking Show/edit details beside an alert in the Tasks table opens details for this alert.
Two tabs are available:
Alert history shows past checks for this alert.
Settings shows the alert settings and allows them to be edited
Alert history
The alert history records every time the alert was checked during an analysis.
The following information is available:
The alert status when it was checked.
The date the alert was checked.
Whether notification(s) were successfully sent. Hover over this column to see which notifications were sent, and which failed.
A link to the pages that match the alert's OQL, in the Data Explorer.
This link may be disabled if the OQL is changed after the check has occurred. This is because the new OQL will return a new set of pages in the Data Explorer, not the pages originally identified as potentially problematic.
A link to show the full crawl report for the complete analysis.
Settings
The alert settings display the crawl profile, the OQL, the preview, the threshold, and the notification settings for the alert.
All of these elements except for the crawl profile can be modified.
Because the crawl profile defines the available metrics and pages, it is an integral part of an alert and cannot be changed after the alert has been created.
Who receives notifications when alerts are triggered?
By default, the owner of the current workspace will be notified by email if an alert triggers. You can change this behavior by setting different notification information.
You can set notifications by:
Email
Slack webhook
Teams webhook
How to resolve typical errors with alerts?
Alerts that cannot be checked during an analysis are reported as having an error status. When this occurs, a warning will appear at the top of the Alerts tab in the Tasks section of the project page.
Filter the table by Last alert status to view the alerts in error.
To obtain more information about an alert in error, click on Show/Edit details.
A warning at the top of both the Alert history and the Settings tabs explains the error. Often, this error is related to metrics used in the OQL for the alert that are no longer available in the associated crawl profile.
Either correct the crawl profile, or create a duplicate the alert (using the three dots at the right of the alert's listing in the Tasks table on the project page and choosing Duplicate) and assign the duplicated alert to a crawl profile that includes the missing data.
