Context
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.
Common examples of alerts
Pages returning a 404 status code
Redirected pages (3xx) or redirect chains
5xx errors
Pages with no text or with unexpectedly little text
Pages with a duplicate or missing title tag
Noindexed home page
Pages forbidden by robots.txt
…
All of these metrics and many more can be monitored by Oncrawl, either site-wide or for a specific page group from one of your segmentations.
Setting up an alert
Finding alerts and creating alerts
On the project page, click on "Alerts" at the top of the crawl tasks box.
⚠️ To view this tab, you must have at least one “live” (completed and unarchived) crawl in your project.
Click on "Set up a new alert" to add a new alert.
Alert properties
On the alert creation page, you'll need to set the following elements:
General settings:
A name for your alert
A description of the alert. This will be used to give additional information when the alert is triggered
A crawl profile. Analyses using other crawl profiles will not trigger this alert.
The trigger conditions for your alert:
The Oncrawl Query Language (OQL) that determines the metric or metrics that will be evaluated
A threshold to trigger the alert:
An operator
A threshold value in number of pages. This value will be compared to the number of pages that are found by the OQL filter.
⚠️ By definition, an alert based on crawl data will always be calculated and evaluated as a number of pages. This means that for any OQL chosen, we'll provide the number of instances of pages (URLs) that meet the OQL criteria.
Example:
I want to be alerted whenever I have more than 23 pages with a 4xx status code.
💡 Once you have defined the metrics, you can click on the “Show preview” button, to view a chart of the trend over the past several unarchived crawls with the same profile.
If you've already provided a threshold value, the “Show preview” button will also show the threshold on the chart, as well as the alerts that would have been triggered for crawls shown.
The type of notification by which you will receive the information about an alert if it is triggered according to your rules:
One or more email addresses
A Slack channel webhook
A Microsoft teams webhook
You must set up at least one type of notification to validate your alert. You can also chose more than one.
Metrics that can be used in the Oncrawl Query Language (OQL) for alerts
You can create alerts using and/or combining the following types of metrics:
Metrics included in all crawls by default
Custom metrics collected through scraping
Metrics added through connectors to GA, GSC, Majestic, Piano, or Adobe Analytics
Metrics from a Core Web Vitals analysis
Page groups defined as part of your segmentations
⚠️ Except for the default crawl metics, all other metrics are available within a specific crawl profile. If you modify the crawl profile for an alert, it may be the case that some metrics will no longer be available in the new profile. In this case, the alert will not work in future crawls.
Managing alerts
Once your alert has been created, it will be taken into account on your next crawl using the chosen crawl profile.
You can find the list of your alerts in the tab “Alerts” on the project page. By default, this list is sorted by the most recently triggered alerts (Last trigger).
You can search for an alert using the built-in “search” function above the summary table. You can also sort the list based on the various columns in order to find your alert.
If you want to prevent an alert from triggering but don't want to delete it, you can disable it in the “Active” column of this list.
Consulting or modifying an alert
If you need to edit an alert, you can do so by clicking on “Show/Edit details” :
All elements of an alert can be modified. However, note that this can impact both how it works in the future and its history:
Modifying the OQL: if this alert has already triggered, the old lists of pages that caused the trigger will no longer be accessible.
Alert history
At the bottom of the alert details page, you will find the details on the last events concerning your alert.
For each crawl with the profile associated with your alert, you will find information about the alert:
The alert status:
Triggered: The alert was triggered during the last crawl using the chosen crawl profile. In this case, you can consult the pages that triggered it by clicking on the number on the right of the table.
Not triggered: The alert was not triggered during the crawl using the profile it was associated with.
Error: An error occurred when the alert triggered. Detailed information is available from the table by clicking on the info symbol.
The link to pages that triggered the alert, if the alert was triggered. If the alert has been modified, this number might be grayed out. In that case, Oncrawl can no longer access the old definition of the alert in order to look up a list of pages.
The notification status, which shows whether an alert notification sent to Slack or Teams was delivered correctly, or whether an error occurred.
Duplicating or deleting an alert
To duplicate or delete an alert, you can click on the expandable menu:
At the top right of the alert details page
Or from the "Alerts" tab on the project home page, at the right of the corresponding row
Duplicating an alert
When you duplicate an alert, you will be taken directly to the alert creation page, where you'll need to enter a name for the new alert.
From the old alert, Oncrawl will copy the following elements:
Crawl profile
OQL definition set up previously
Chosen operator
Trigger threshold value
Information about the notification method: the list of email addresses and/or the Slack or Teams webhooks