Monitoring Your Catalogs and Channels

Monitors watch your catalogs and channels and alert you when something needs attention — a shrinking product count, a failed import, a field going empty. They can email the people who need to know, and they can hold a channel's publish so the previous feed stays live until the problem clears.

Updated August 20, 2026

A monitor is a rule that keeps an eye on your catalogs and channels so you don't have to. You describe what to watch for — "product count drops sharply", "no successful import in a day", "the price field starts going empty" — and Renable checks it for you and raises an alert when it happens. You'll find your monitors on the Monitoring page in the top navigation.

Monitors are built for both ways of working: describe what you want in plain language and let Aimée set it up, or build one yourself on the monitor page. Either way you get the same monitor, and you can always open and adjust it later.

What a monitor can watch#

Each monitor checks one kind of thing:

  • After each catalog import — the import's numbers: product count and how much it changed, new and removed products, products with warnings, how full each field is, or simply whether the import failed.
  • After each channel feed update — the feed's numbers every time a channel rebuilds: how many products made it in, how many were excluded, out of stock or archived, how much any of those changed since the last update, or whether the update failed.
  • When an event is reported — reacts to warnings and errors as they appear anywhere in your account, filtered by how serious they are. Useful for relaying anything that needs attention to your inbox.
  • On a schedule — checked regularly, for conditions about time: a catalog that hasn't had a successful import in too many hours, or a channel that hasn't published in a while.

A monitor can watch all your catalogs (or channels) at once, or just the ones you pick. A monitor watching all catalogs checks each one separately — if two catalogs shrink, you get an alert on each.

What happens when a monitor triggers#

When the condition holds, the monitor triggers and raises an alert:

  • The alert appears on your dashboard's attention list and on the affected catalog or channel's Activity tab, like any other warning or error.
  • If the monitor has email turned on, you get one email when it triggers — not a repeat every time the condition is checked. The alert stays visible in the app for as long as the problem persists.
  • When a later check passes — the next import looks normal, the field fills up again — the monitor clears on its own and the alert disappears. There's nothing to tidy up.

You choose whether an alert is raised as a Warning or an Error, and you can write your own alert text or leave it empty for an automatic summary of what was observed. Your own text is written the same way a condition is: observed values, the affected catalog or channel and links back into the app are picked from a list, so there is nothing to remember or spell correctly. The email a monitor sends can carry its own title and body written the same way.

Holding a channel's publish#

A monitor that checks catalog imports or channel feed updates can also hold the publish: when it triggers, affected channels keep their previously published feed live instead of publishing the suspicious new one. Your ads keep running on the last good data, and the hold clears on its own as soon as a check passes.

While a publish is held, the channel page shows a Publish held chip, and the channel's Activity tab shows the update that was held. If you're confident the data is fine, you can still publish manually — the channel page asks you to confirm and offers Publish anyway. See Hold a channel's publish when something looks wrong.

Email alerts#

Alerts always show in the app. Email is optional, per monitor: send to members of your team, or to any other address — a client, a shared inbox. Addresses outside your team must click a verification link before any alerts are sent to them.

A monitor can send more than one email, each to its own people and with its own wording — a short plain-language note to the store owner and a technical one to a shared team inbox, from the same monitor. See Email alerts and verified addresses.

The monitors you start with#

Every organization comes with three monitors, already on:

  • Import fails — raises an Error alert when a catalog import fails.
  • Publish fails — raises an Error alert when a channel feed update fails.
  • Product count drops sharply — raises a Warning alert when a catalog shrinks more than 30% between imports.

They're ordinary monitors: open them to add email, adjust the threshold, pause them, or archive them. None of them sends email until you turn that on.

Pausing, editing, and archiving#

  • The switch on each monitor card — and on the status line at the top of the monitor page — turns it on or off immediately, without publishing. Pausing a noisy monitor takes one click and clears its open alerts, which is why a paused monitor's status line says it isn't checking anything.
  • Edits are drafts: nothing changes what's being checked until you press Publish on the monitor page. Every published version is kept in history. A monitor you've never published isn't checking anything yet, and its status line says so.
  • Monitors are archived, never deleted — from the card's menu, or from the menu on the monitor page's status line. Archiving clears the monitor's open alerts and keeps its history.

Where to go next#