Collection answers the question “what new has appeared”. A monitor answers a different question: “what has changed in the thing I am watching”. The practical difference is huge: a pricing page can be rewritten every week, but when you care about one line — the base plan’s price — you want to hear only about it.
What a monitor is
A monitor is an assignment: “watch this value on this page and tell me on that kind of change”. It is created in words and lives in a settings file:
“Watch this product’s price and availability. Warn me when the price drops more than 5% and when the product runs out.”
The agent then decides by itself which fields to take and which threshold to set, and you look at the result on the Monitors screen.
The watch region
Before comparing, it must be decided where to look. There are three regions:
- The page as a whole — all meaningful parts of the page are compared. Good for small pages, and when you do not yet know what exactly will change.
- List blocks — comparison inside a block where records follow one another: products, listings, table rows.
- Individual values — the most exact: you name a specific element of the page, and from then on only it is compared.
Fields and their values
A field is what you named and watch: price, availability, title, date, average score. There can be as many fields as you like — one or several at once. For every field the agent keeps a history of values and shows it as a chart: you see not only “it got cheaper” but also how the price behaved over the last months.
Values by your own code
Sometimes the needed value cannot be taken the usual way: it is substituted onto the page later, or sits in an unusual place. Then your own Python code extracts the value:
- Your own value lives like an ordinary one — it has the same history, the same chart and the same thresholds as the built-in ones. You can both add a new value and replace a built-in one.
- The page can be cleaned before comparing — remove random inserts and banners that cause false alarms.
- A code failure is an honest error — the check is marked as errored and the values are not saved: better a skip than a wrong number.
Details — in the Custom Scripts section.
Comparison modes and the threshold
The threshold answers the question “which changes count as significant”. Without it you get an alarm on every penny: prices on sites move with currency recomputation and small layout edits.
- Any change — always report. Fits product availability: it is either there or not.
- A percentage threshold — “tell me when it gets more than 5% cheaper”. This is the one needed most often.
- An absolute amount — “tell me when the price moves by more than 500 dollars”.
Alongside there is the baseline — the starting value, the reference point. It can be pinned by hand (“we count from today’s price”) or cleared when comparing should start over.
“Before and after” snapshots
For every trigger, two snapshots are kept: what the value was and what it became. Old snapshots are deleted by retention — so the archive does not grow forever. The snapshots are the evidence you later check against: “was it really 12,900?”
Schedule and health
A monitor has a schedule: how often to check. Twice a day is enough for a price; for a hot product’s availability — once an hour. The source’s state is visible right on the card: “active”, “a streak of failures”, “error”, “paused”, “waiting for the first check”. When a site stops answering, you will not be guessing why it is silent.
Managing a monitor
There are no editing forms in the interface — the monitor card carries command buttons. Each prefills a ready phrase into the chat with your agent, and when the chat is not connected — copies a ready command to send by hand:
- Check now — an out-of-schedule check, without waiting for the plan.
- Change the schedule — check more often or less often.
- Pause — the product was taken off sale; there is nothing more to watch.
- Archive — the monitor is no longer needed, but the value history stays.
Peculiarities
- Whole-page comparison works without fields too, but yields noisier events: any block reshuffle looks like a change.
- Visual comparison by screenshots needs an external service and is off by default. Until it is connected, only text and value comparison honestly works.
Next → Events & Evidence