Navigating Alerts

• How do alerts work?

• I just received an alert, what now?

  • Navigating the email

  • Using the difference modal

• Frequently Asked Questions

When Visualping checks the site monitored and detects a change, it will send you a notification right away to let you know what changed. From there you can check out the site, the difference modal, or update your monitor if the alert was not relevant. This article will show you what you can expect from alerts, and how to check the details of important changes.

An email alert for Visualping will be sent from hello@visualping.io and have a standard email subject in this format: 1) Importance 2) "change on" 3) monitor name.

So the subject of an email alert might be: "🚨 IMPORTANT: change on Visualping Knowledge Base"

The email contains the following, from top to bottom:

• Monitor title: A link to the site monitored. Click it to quickly access the site and check out the changes yourself. The workspace and any labels on the monitor are shown with it.

• AI summary: A summary of the changes detected, along with the important criteria (AI prompt) used for that alert.

• Text changes: The text that was added and removed. If you set up keyword alerts, the matched keywords are shown as well.

• Current and Previous images: Side-by-side screenshots of the page after and before the change, with new content highlighted in green and deleted content in red. Click either image to open the change in the difference modal.

• Actions: Quick links to act on the alert (see the table below).

• Feedback: Rate the alert to let us know if it was relevant to you.

The action links are:

Note: Change alert emails don't have an unsubscribe link. To stop receiving alerts for a monitor, pause it, or disable email notifications for that monitor.

The difference modal lets you take a closer look at the differences Visualping detected. You can get here by clicking View Changes or either screenshot in the email alert, or by clicking the alert thumbnail on the dashboard.

1. Change analysis (left sidebar)

The left sidebar has three tabs: Summary, Changes, and Comments. Together they include:

• Change Summary: An AI-powered explanation of the changes detected on the page, with a focus on your important criteria.

• Important Criteria: The AI prompt used for this alert (e.g., "a new article comes out") that tells Visualping exactly what type of changes to look for.

• Feedback: Tells us if the alert is relevant.

• Changes List: A list of every addition and deletion found on the page. Click on any item to jump to that section and highlight it.

• Comments: Notes about the change. Comments are visible to everyone with access to the workspace.

• Spotlight: Dims the area outside the part of the page you are monitoring. Toggle it off to see the full page normally. This is only visible if you monitor a specific area.

• Text Added: Toggles whether additions, in green, are shown. This also affects the Changes List.

• Text Deleted: Toggles whether deletions, in red, are shown. This also affects the Changes List.

2. Visual View

The centre of the screen features a "Current and Previous" slider that allows you to visually compare the current and previous site versions:

• Current (left side): Shows the current state of the site monitored.

• Previous (right side): Shows the previous version of the page, which is dimmed to emphasize the differences.

• Highlighting: Green highlights indicate added text, while red highlights indicate deleted text.

• Slider: Click the blue grab handle icon in the middle and drag it left or right to compare the current and previous screenshots.

• View image in detail: Click on the image to open it in a new tab or download it.

3. Text Changes

The Text Changes tab allows for a simpler, text-based comparison.

• Changes: Text that was added is shown in green, and text that was deleted is shown crossed out and red. If you set up keyword alerts, matched keywords are highlighted in yellow.

• Jump to next: Moves to the next text change on the page.

• Find: You can use your browser's Find function (Cmd/Ctrl + F) to quickly find keywords on this page.

Note: For PDF monitors, the Text Changes tab is not available. Use the Visual View instead.

4. Extra tools (top right section)

• Share: You can share the alert in multiple ways. Anyone with the link can view the change without logging in.

  • Print the page or save as PDF

  • Send the alert as an email

  • Copy a shareable URL of the alert

  • Copy the embed code to display the alert on a website

• View full screen: Opens the modal in a new tab.

• Visit site: Opens the site monitored.

• Close modal: Closes the modal and takes you back to the dashboard.

First, confirm that the monitor checked the page after the site change by reviewing the check history in the dashboard or Timeline View. Alerts are only sent after a new check runs and the latest version is compared with the previous version. If the page was checked after the change but no alert was sent, follow the steps below in order.

1. Ensure Email notifications are enabled in the monitor's Notifications tab. If Email is disabled, alerts will not be sent for the monitor and will only be visible in the dashboard.

2. Make sure you haven't muted the workspace the monitor belongs to (see Notifications Overview). Muting a workspace stops email and SMS alerts for your account only. It does not affect other users in the same workspace, or other notification methods such as Slack or webhooks.

3. Check with other users in the same workspace to confirm whether they received the email alert. If others received it, the issue is likely limited to your personal notification settings or email inbox. If no one received it, the issue may be related to the monitor configuration or detection settings.

4. Check your spam or junk folder and search for the monitor name or hello@visualping.io. If the email is there, mark it as not spam or add the sender to your contacts to prevent future filtering.

5. If all of the above are correct, the alert may have been suppressed due to system configuration or the change may not have met the monitor's alert settings. Contact Support and include the page URL or monitor name, what changed, and when the change occurred so we can investigate.

You can read through our guides below to reduce false alerts.

• Creating a strong prompt

• How to reduce false positives

Alerts can be sent via SMS, n8n, Slack, Google Sheets, Webhook and more. See the Notifications Overview for details. Note that some notification methods are limited to specific plans.

If none of the troubleshooting steps above resolve the problem, or if you are running into technical issues, reach out to our Support team at support@visualping.io. Include the page URL, what you were trying to do, and any error messages so we can help faster.

• Notifications Overview

• How to reduce false positives

• How to create a basic monitoring job

• How do I disable email notifications for individual jobs?