How to view logs of checks?

What is Check Log?

Check log stores log information of time for the recent 20 checks. If a monitor encounters an error during the check, the time is shown in red. You can click on the error code to view more details about it. To view the check-log, click the “last changed time” as shown below in the image.

Log of checks

Please note that the check log is only shown on the device where the monitor runs for checks and is not synced across the devices. “Last changed on” time is the time when the latest change was detected. The time shown is in your local timezone.

In case of an error, check-log registers an error with code. You can click on the error code to get more details on the error. Check out the “Troubleshooting common errors” section below to get help on the errors. Monitors running with errors can be viewed all at once from the Error folder. In the case of 10 consecutive errors for a cloud Monitor, the Monitor switches off automatically.

Troubleshooting common errors

Some common types of errors encountered are:

SELECTION_EMPTY

Checkout page’s snapshot by clicking “View Details” link in the log. The snapshot is captured when the page was loaded but Distill couldn’t find the selected content in the page.

Some of the common reasons for a SELECTION_EMPTY error are:

  1. When the monitor was working well earlier but started encountering this error. It is possible that the elements selected earlier no longer exist on the page. You can create a new monitor or change the selection of the existing monitor using visual selector to see if it works.

  2. When the selected element loads after a delay. This can happen when the element is dynamic and it loads after some delay. In this case, you can add a delay in the config. To add a delay, go to the config of the existing monitor, change the delay to some value. This value is in seconds. By setting a delay, Distill will wait for the delay period for the page to load and then check the elements.

  3. When you select an element with some text but expect that it will change to no text and you want to get an alert on such no text change. You can include an additional element in the selection. A good example of such an element is the page’s <title> element. The tag’s XPath seletor is //title and CSS selector is title.

  4. When the page is blocking access from Distill servers. In this case, the page provides an error response to the server. You can use Proxies to run checks in the cloud. Please check out: https://distill.io/docs/web-monitor/monitor-webpage-using-proxy-servers/. Alternatively, you can use local checks to run the monitor in your browser.

TIMEOUT

You get this error when Distill is not able to load the page contents. This can happen in the following cases.

  1. Local monitor does not load in a background tab. Some pages need an active tab to load completely. You can verify this by clicking on the tab which checks the page. If clicking on it runs the check without any error and throws an error otherwise, it means the page requires to be active for the checks. For those kinds of pages, the cloud monitor should work.

  2. Cloud monitor times out when websites refuse to accept connections from some IPs. In these cases try using proxy servers in the cloud. Check out: https://distill.io/docs/web-monitor/monitor-webpage-using-proxy-servers/ for more information. Alternatively, you can use local checks to run the monitor in your browser.

  3. Cloud monitors do not work with any proxy. In most cases, using a local monitor works.

ETIMEDOUT

This happens when the connection to the remote server is timed out for static monitors. In those cases set dynamic to true in config.

EREQUEST, ECONNREFUSED

Usually when fetching content to load a page statically, a server may return an error response. In those cases, this error code is logged. Set dynamic to true in the config to check if the page loads correctly.

EJAVASCRIPT

It is usually logged when a JavaScript selector throws an error. You can try looking for the error in the script and fix it.

Feel free to contact us in case you need any help with troubleshooting.

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