Monitors

Creating a monitor

A monitor has six parts. You set them when you create it, and you can change any of them later.

• Name. How it shows up in lists and alerts (“Acme pricing”).
• URL. The public page to watch. modsignal monitors the public web only, so pages behind a login or paywall, or on a private network, are refused at creation.
• Prompt. The sentence that says what counts as a change. On the semantic and browser-agent tiers, this is what the model judges against. On exact diff it changes nothing, but it tells your teammates why the monitor exists.
• Check tier. diff, ai, or agent. See check tiers.
• Check interval. How often to check, from every 2 minutes (the fastest, and it depends on your plan) to every 24 hours. Leave it unset and the monitor uses your plan's default cadence.
• Tags. Up to 10 free-form labels for keeping a long monitor list in order (“competitor”, “vendor-risk”).

The first run captures a baseline snapshot and never alerts, because there is nothing to compare against yet. Every check after that compares the fresh page against the last snapshot. You can also run a check yourself at any time with Run now, on the monitor page or via the API.

Writing prompts that stay quiet

The prompt is your noise filter. “Watch this page” leaves the semantic tier guessing at what you meant. A precise prompt tells it exactly what to ignore. Good prompts name three things: the change that matters, the details that define it, and the noise to skip.

• Watch this pricing page. Alert me if a price, plan limit, or trial length changes, or a plan is added or removed. Ignore design changes and copy edits.
• Alert me if any subprocessor is added or removed, or if a processing location moves outside the EU/EEA.
• Tell me when this changelog announces a breaking change or deprecation for the v2 API. Ignore minor releases.

You can edit a prompt at any time without losing history. Most people tighten the “ignore” clause after their first false alarm, and that is the intended way to use it.

Templates

The Templates page in the dashboard has ready-made monitors for common jobs: competitor pricing pages, subprocessor lists, API deprecation notices, marketplace reviews. Each comes with a working prompt and a sensible tier already chosen. Pick the closest one, swap in your URL, and edit from there. The prompts already account for the noise each kind of page tends to produce.

Scheduling and intervals

Checks run on the interval you set, up to the fastest your plan allows: daily on Free, every 15 minutes on Pro, every 5 minutes on Scale, every 2 minutes on Business. The picker only offers intervals your plan allows. If a plan change leaves a monitor set faster than the new plan supports, it runs at the new plan's fastest instead. Checks are never billed per run. The interval is a plan feature, not a meter.

Set the interval to match how often the page actually moves. Legal and subprocessor pages change a few times a year, so daily is plenty (objection windows are measured in weeks). Pricing pages move around launches, so hourly during launch season and daily the rest of the time.

Pausing, resuming, and failure handling

Pausing a monitor keeps its history, prompt, and schedule but stops the checks. Resuming is one click. Deleting a monitor also deletes its snapshots and alert history, and only owners and admins can do it.

When a monitor fails 5 consecutive checks (the page is gone, the server blocks us, the URL changed), modsignal pauses it automatically and notifies your team on every channel you have configured, rather than checking a dead page forever. The notice includes the last error. Review it and resume from the monitor page.