> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://metamanager.dev/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Monitoring

> Re-audit a site on a schedule and get an email when its metadata breaks.

An audit tells you how a site looks today. A monitor tells you when that
changes — it re-runs the audit on a schedule, compares it to the last one, and
emails you when something breaks.

Monitors are configured in [your dashboard](https://metamanager.dev/audits) and
are a Pro feature.

|               | Free |             Pro |
| :------------ | ---: | --------------: |
| Sites watched |    — |               3 |
| Frequency     |    — | Daily or weekly |

<Note>
  **Scheduled runs do not spend your monthly audit allowance.** One daily
  monitor would otherwise consume thirty of a Pro account's fifty audits and
  crowd out checking pages by hand. The cap on how many sites you watch is what
  bounds the crawling instead.
</Note>

## What counts as a change

Seven fields are compared between runs, page by page:

| Field            |
| :--------------- |
| `title`          |
| `description`    |
| `canonical`      |
| `og:title`       |
| `og:description` |
| `og:image`       |
| `twitter:card`   |

These are the ones that decide how a page looks when it is shared, or where
search sends people. A change is reported with both values:

```text theme={null}
og:title changed

  before: My Product — AI Analytics
  after:  My Product
```

**Whitespace is not a change.** Values are compared after collapsing runs of
spaces and newlines, so a deploy that reflows your templates does not report
every page as different.

## What earns an email

Not everything that changes. You are emailed when:

* a page gains an issue it did not have
* a page that was reachable no longer is

You are **not** emailed for a reworded description, a retitled page, or an issue
being fixed. Those still appear in the audit; they do not warrant an
interruption.

<Warning>
  This restraint is deliberate. Monitoring that reports every content edit gets
  filtered into a folder nobody opens, and the one alert that mattered goes with
  it.
</Warning>

The first run of a new monitor never emails — there is nothing to compare it
against, and every existing issue would look new.

A site that stays broken produces **one** email, not one per run. Alerts have a
cooldown of about a day.

## What the email says

```text theme={null}
MetaManager found 2 new metadata issues on example.com

/blog/new-product
  - missing og image
  - missing description

Full report: https://metamanager.dev/audits#aud_...
```

Pages that changed but did not break are listed after the problems, with their
before and after, so a skim reaches what is wrong first.

## Where the email goes

By default, to the address you sign in with.

Each monitor can send its alerts somewhere else instead — a shared inbox, an
on-call address, or whoever actually looks after that site. Open the monitor,
choose **Settings**, and enter the address.

A confirmation is sent to that address first, and the link in it is valid for
**24 hours**. Until it is confirmed, alerts keep going to the account holder —
so a typo means you keep receiving them, rather than nobody receiving them.

<Note>
  The recipient is per monitor, not per account. Two sites watched by the same
  account can alert two different teams.
</Note>

To go back to the account holder, clear the address on that monitor.

## Scheduling

A new monitor runs on the next tick rather than after a full interval, so you
see the first result within about fifteen minutes.

After that, each run is scheduled from its **slot** rather than from when the
previous crawl finished — a daily monitor stays on its hour instead of drifting
later every day by however long the crawl took.

Pausing a monitor stops it without losing its history. Resuming schedules the
next run from now, so a monitor paused for a month does not immediately audit
your site several times over to catch up.

## What a monitored run does to your site

Exactly what a manual [site audit](/docs/guides/site-audits) does: one page at a
time, obeying `robots.txt`, backing off if your server starts returning errors.
A weekly monitor of a 200-page site is 200 requests a week.

If that is more than you want, `robots.txt` is the control — our crawler
[explains itself](https://metamanager.dev/bot) and obeys it.