To keep your alerts effective over time with minimal effort, Monitor’s Smart Alerts can automatically set new alert thresholds for you based on your recent crawl data. Alternatively, you can have Monitor suggest new thresholds for you to accept or reject, or leave your thresholds alone entirely.
You set this separately for the two situations — when an issue improves and when an issue worsens — and for each you can choose whether Monitor:
- Automatically accepts new suggested thresholds
- Manually accepts — suggests a new threshold for you to accept or reject
- Doesn’t suggest thresholds
So you might, for example, auto-accept tighter thresholds when things improve, but have worse thresholds only suggested for your review — or any other combination.
When an issue gets worse
As an issue gets worse, we want to avoid bombarding you with notifications about a problem you already know about — while still alerting you if it gets even worse. So when a notification triggers, Monitor can move the threshold up to the new level.
For example, if your broken pages increase from 10 to 30, the suggested threshold updates to around 30 — so you won’t be notified again unless the count climbs higher still.
The new threshold is based on the most recent value:
- For greater than or equal to rules, it’s based on the most recent value.
- For less than rules, it’s based on the most recent value.
This happens off a single triggering crawl — there’s no waiting period. It only ever moves the threshold in the rule’s “worse” direction: for a greater than or equal to rule that’s the number going up, and for a less than rule it’s the number going down. A change the other way doesn’t count as the issue getting worse, so it won’t move the threshold.
Worse-case suggestions appear on the notifications themselves. If you’ve set Smart Alerts to automatically accept, the threshold updates and all new notifications are at the new level. If you’re accepting manually, you can accept or reject each suggestion — accepting updates the threshold, rejecting leaves it as it was.
When an issue improves
When a rule has passed consistently, your threshold can drift further from reality than it needs to be, leaving a gap where a new problem could grow without tripping the alert. To prevent that, Monitor can tighten the threshold back in line with your improved performance.
This happens after 5 consecutive crawls without the alert being triggered for that rule — so a single good crawl won’t tighten things prematurely. For example, if your broken pages decrease from 300 to 20 over that period, the suggested threshold could update to around 60.
The new threshold is calculated from your last five crawls:
- For greater than or equal to rules, it’s based on the highest value across the last five crawls.
- For less than rules, it’s based on the lowest value across the last five crawls.
What happens next depends on your If issue improves setting for that rule:
- Automatically accept — Monitor tightens the threshold for you, and nothing is shown for you to review.
- Manually accept — Monitor generates a suggested threshold for you to review.
- Don’t suggest — Monitor makes no change.
When you’re accepting manually, improve-case suggestions appear on the Adjustments tab in the Notifications Center, where you can accept or reject each one.
Finding your suggestions
All of this lives in the Notifications Center, which separates Report Notifications from Health Score Notifications. Within each, you’ll see tabs for Notifications (where worse-case suggestions appear), Adjustments (where improve-case suggestions appear when set to manual), plus Working on it and Archived. The Adjustments tab will be empty until a rule produces one.
Health Score alerts
Smart Alerts work the same way for Health Score rules, where the threshold is a score between 1 and 100. The one difference is that a suggested Health Score threshold is never set above 100.
If you set a threshold manually
If you overwrite a threshold with your own value, that rule stops automatically recalculating. To return to automatic thresholds, remove the rule and create it again.
When a crawl is deleted
If you delete a crawl that a suggestion was based on, that suggestion disappears. However, if a suggested threshold had already been applied or accepted, it stays in your rule even after the crawl is deleted.