Profiles for Cloud Monitors

Profiles are available in the Starter plan and above.

Our browsers keep track of our identity using cookies. These cookies are saved in browser profiles in our PC. When you use Distill’s browser extensions to monitor any page for changes, the browser automatically uses the cookies to access the page and monitor its content.

When monitoring a page in cloud, Distill doesn’t have access to the profiles saved on your personal computers. It uses a blank profile instead. If the page requires cookies, lets say for remembering older choice or for authentication, it doesn’t work with an empty profile.

A Profile for cloud makes it possible to monitor such pages to Distill’s paid customers. Each check done using a profile is counted as two checks for accounting purposes.

Related: How to Monitor Password Protected Pages for Changes

Create a Profile

To create a new profile, follow these steps below:

  1. Go to your Watchlist. Click hamburger icon ☰ in the toolbar and click “Profiles”.
  2. Profiles list is shown. Enter a new profile name and click “Add New Profile” button.
  3. A remote browser is opened. Go to the page that you need to monitor. If you need to accept a cookie or save a setting, perform that action. If you need to sign in to a website, go to their sign in page and fill out the forms to do so.
  4. Click “Save cookies and close” button. Its saves cookies that were created while browsing the pages using Distill’s remote browser. You can choose to discard the cookies in this session if you need to start over.

Use the Profile

In order to use the profile for checking a monitor, go to the monitor’s Options page. Under “Device”, notice that by default, an empty profile is used. You can select the newly created profile to use for subsequent checks.

Limitations

Cookies saved in the profile has to be created manually by opening the remote browser and browsing the pages.

Roadmap

Support for cloud profile is being actively developed. In future versions, you can record macros that can be replayed regularly to auto generate and save the cookies.

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