# Alerts and incidents

**One problem is one alert, however many pages it hits.** That single rule is what decides whether alerting stays useful past the first week.

## Why grouping matters

A theme deploy adds `noindex` to a template used by four hundred pages. Alerting per page sends four hundred emails, describing one mistake with one fix. Nobody reads the four hundredth, and after a fortnight nobody reads the first either.

Monitor groups related findings into an **incident**: one notification, with the pattern and the list of affected pages inside it.

## What an incident contains

- What changed, and what it was before.
- How many pages, and which.
- When it started — the crawl that first saw it.
- Whether it is still happening.

An incident stays open while the condition persists and resolves itself when a later crawl finds it gone. So the incident list is the current state of the site, not a log.

## What you are alerted about

By default the things that cost you traffic or money if unnoticed:

- Pages becoming unreachable or returning errors.
- Pages becoming non-indexable.
- Canonicals changing.
- Large-scale metadata changes.
- A crawl failing to complete.

Medium and low findings accumulate in the reports rather than interrupting you.

## Where they go

Email, and Slack if connected. Set recipients per site — the person who owns a documentation site is rarely the person who owns the marketing site.

## Keeping it signal

- **Alert to a channel a person actually reads.** An alert routed to a channel nobody watches is a metric, not an alert.
- **Scope the crawl.** Most alert noise is really scope: tag archives and paginated listings generating findings that are true and uninteresting. See [adding a site to Monitor](/docs/adding-a-site-to-monitor).
- **Mute deliberately.** Mute the page or the pattern, not the rule site-wide — a muted rule is silent when it later fires for a real reason.

## Related

- [Issues and severity](/docs/issues-and-severity)
- [Changes and diffs](/docs/changes-and-diffs)
- [Monitor settings](/docs/monitor-settings)