Navigating Alerts

• How do alerts work?

• Navigating alerts from emails

• Analyzing the alert 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 job 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) job name.

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

The title of the job, at the top of the email, is a hyperlink to the site monitored. You can click it to quickly access the site and check out the changes yourself.

Underneath you will find a summary of the changes detected and the Important criteria (AI prompt) used for that alert.

Below the AI summary, you'll notice 4 icons which are present in multiple locations on your email:

You'll then see an image with new additions highlighted in green. Then a few text changes that are considered important. Above the image, you have the option to rate the alert. This lets us know if the alert is relevant to you.

Finally you will see two comparison images representing the before and after of the full site, with new content highlighted in green and deleted content in red. Click on the image to view or download it. You will also get a link to View Changes, which will redirect you towards the difference modal.

The difference modal lets you take a closer look at the differences Visualping detected. You can get here by clicking the View Changes link from the email alert, or from the dashboard by clicking the alert thumbnail as shown below.

Difference modal breakdown

1. Change Analysis (Left Sidebar)

The left column provides an intelligent summary of the detected changes:

• Change Summary: The summary is an AI powered explanation of the changes detected in the page, with a focus on your important criteria.

• Important Criteria: This shows 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: This tells us if the alert is relevant.

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

• Spotlight: Can be toggled off to remove the grey outside of the monitoring area. This is visible if you set a Focus area.

• Text Added: Used to toggle whether the current page, in green, is shown. This also affects the Changes List.

• Text Deleted: Used to toggle whether the previous page, in red, is 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 more simplified, text comparison.

• Changes: Text that was added is shown in green, and text that was deleted is shown crossed out and red

• Jump to next: Can be used to traverse through text changes.

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

4. Extra tools (top right section)

• Share: You can share the alert in multiple ways.

  • 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: Click to view the modal on another tab.

• Visit site: Click to visit the site monitored.

• Close modal: Click to close modal and navigate back to the dashboard.

First, confirm that the job checked the page after the site change by reviewing the Check History in the dashboard. 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 job’s Notifications tab. If Email is disabled, alerts will not be sent for the job and will only be visible in the dashboard.

2. Make sure the workspace where the job belongs is not muted (read help article). Muting a workspace only stops email alerts for your account and does not affect alerts for other users in the same workspace.

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 job configuration or detection settings.

4. Check your spam or junk folder and search for the job 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 job’s alert settings. Contact Support and include the page URL or job name, what changed, and when the change occurred so we can investigate.

The Visual View has a 16384px screenshot limit. However the Text View does not have a limit, so check it out to see the full page that is being monitored.

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

• Upgrade your AI prompt.

• How to reduce false positives

Alerts can be sent via SMS, n8n, Slack, Google Sheet, Webhook and more. You can read the Notifications Overview article for more details. Note that some alerts 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. 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 make a basic monitoring job