I have sent up a monitor to check a webpage of brand-specific clothing product listings at the same time every day, and I would like to receive a notification when a new listings in specific sizes are added. The sizes are M, 30 and 46.
I have set up a full page monitor running on the Distill Server with conditions (Added text contains M) OR (Added text contains 30) OR (Added text contains 46)
However, I seem to be getting a lot of notifications even when my criteria are not met (i.e, when the text displayed on the webpage does not include M, 30 or 46).
Could you recommend any fixes or alternative ways to approach this?
one of the best ways to minimize false alerts is to monitor a more specific part of the page. in marrkt’s case, monitoring only the list of items is a good idea.
once the selection has been finetuned, conditions can be used to get alerts only when specific changes are found.
for figuring out why an alert or triggred, check out the following article Optimizing Alerts with Conditions – Distill. look for section “How to find out which condition triggered the alert?”. the notification status modal shows the list of conditions and their match status. let me know what you observe. thanks!
I followed your suggestions and the monitor is working a lot better. I initially changed the selection to only the product listing. However I ran into an issue where sometimes there are no products listed and this created an error and caused the monitor to turn itself off. Now I am monitoring the product listings as well as a small text item at the bottom of the page that never changes but is never empty so hopefully the error will be avoided.
As a follow up question, is there a way to set a monitor to only check during a specific window of time (e.g., between 3pm and 5pm)?
I am finding that the monitors don’t check at precise intervals. Ideally I would like as frequent checks as possible during a specific time range (e.g., 3pm and 5pm). How I am doing that now is I am running four separate monitors scheduled to check daily. One at 3:00, one at 3:30, one at 4:00 and one at 4:30). I need the monitors to send me notifications through my phone so am using the distill server and phone app. However, I am finding that the actual check times vary from the scheduled time and deviate from this pattern. Is there a way to correct this?
Based on the criteria above, I am still getting alerts that don’t meet my criteria. It is because products are sometimes added with the letter “m” in the name. Is there a way to create a condition that looks for only an “M” by itself, or only one that is capitalized? Or should I further refine the selection so as to avoid getting these unwonted alerts?
an interval-based schedule uses the time last check happened at as a reference to schedule the next check. as a result, it can’t perform check at a specific time, only after a certain time after the last check happened.
you shouldn’t run duplicate monitors in cloud in the free plan. it wastes resources that other users in the free plan could use for a more useful task.
the best way to get fast checks is to use local monitoring. time slots for checks are supported using extension or the deskop app in all paid plans too.
i am not sure as it depends on the use case. can you share examples of a change that you want to get notified of and a change that you don’t want to receive notification for?