Monitors and Alerts Explained

Two words carry the whole monitoring vocabulary — here's precisely what each means.

Monitor#

A monitor is a rule that watches your catalogs and channels and reacts when a condition holds. "Alert me when a catalog's product count drops more than 25% between imports" is a monitor: what to check (each catalog import), the condition (product count change below -25%), and what to do (raise a Warning alert, maybe send an email).

What a monitor does when it triggers is a list of actions, and it needs at least one: Raise an alert, Send an email (up to 10), Hold the publish and Send a webhook (up to 10). The alert is optional — a monitor can just email you, just hold the publish, or just tell another system.

Monitors belong to your organization, not to any single catalog or channel — one monitor can watch everything you have, a subset, or exactly one feed. They live on the Monitoring page.

A monitor triggers when its condition holds for some catalog or channel, and clears on its own when a later check passes. Each catalog or channel is judged separately: a monitor watching all catalogs can be triggered on one catalog and quiet on the rest.

The condition is optional too — except on a schedule, which needs one. A monitor with no condition matches every check it makes — every import, every channel run or every matching event. One that checks after imports or channel runs therefore triggers on the first check and stays triggered, so its email goes out once rather than every time, and any alert it raises never clears: each catalog or channel it watches shows as needing attention until you pause it. One that reacts to events clears again once none of the events it watches is open.

A monitor can also hold a channel's publish while triggered, keeping the previously published feed live instead of publishing suspicious data — see Hold a channel's publish when something looks wrong.

Monitors are paused with a switch (instant, no publish step) and archived rather than deleted. Edits are drafts until you press Publish, with every published version kept in history.

Alert#

An alert is what a monitor with Raise an alert shows when it triggers:

• In the app — an entry on the dashboard's attention list and on the affected catalog or channel's Activity tab, raised as a Warning or an Error depending on how the monitor is set up. It looks and behaves like any other warning or error in Renable.
• By email — with Send an email, one email per incident, to team members or verified outside addresses. A monitor can send several different emails, each to its own people with its own wording (see Email alerts and verified addresses).

An alert is not a to-do item you close: it disappears on its own when the monitor clears. If an alert lingers, the condition is still true — that's the signal to go look.

A monitor that holds the publish always shows an Error alert while it holds, even without Raise an alert — a held publish is never hidden. That alert carries the Publish button that lets you publish anyway.

A monitor whose webhook can't be delivered also raises an Error alert, saying so. There's one for each failing webhook. It clears with the next successful delivery to that webhook, or when you remove that webhook and publish.