Two words carry the whole monitoring vocabulary — here's precisely what each means.
Monitor#
A monitor is a rule that watches your catalogs and channels and reacts when a condition holds. "Alert me when a catalog's product count drops more than 25% between imports" is a monitor: what to check (each catalog import), the condition (product count change below -25%), and what to do (raise a Warning alert, maybe send an email).
Monitors belong to your organization, not to any single catalog or channel — one monitor can watch everything you have, a subset, or exactly one feed. They live on the Monitoring page.
A monitor triggers when its condition holds for some catalog or channel, and clears on its own when a later check passes. Each catalog or channel is judged separately: a monitor watching all catalogs can be triggered on one catalog and quiet on the rest.
A monitor can also hold a channel's publish while triggered, keeping the previously published feed live instead of publishing suspicious data — see Hold a channel's publish when something looks wrong.
Monitors are paused with a switch (instant, no publish step) and archived rather than deleted. Edits are drafts until you press Publish, with every published version kept in history.
Alert#
An alert is what you receive when a monitor triggers:
- In the app — an entry on the dashboard's attention list and on the affected catalog or channel's Activity tab, raised as a Warning or an Error depending on how the monitor is set up. It looks and behaves like any other warning or error in Renable.
- By email — optionally, one email per incident, to team members or verified outside addresses. A monitor can send several different emails, each to its own people with its own wording (see Email alerts and verified addresses).
An alert is not a to-do item you close: it disappears on its own when the monitor clears. If an alert lingers, the condition is still true — that's the signal to go look.
Related terms#
- Trigger / clear — a monitor triggers when its condition holds and clears when it stops holding. Both happen automatically.
- Publish held — the status a channel's feed update gets when a monitor held its publish. The previous feed stays live; the hold clears with the monitor.
- Verified address — an email address outside your team that has clicked its verification link. Alerts are only ever emailed to team members and verified addresses.
For the full picture, start with Monitoring your catalogs and channels.