Silence alerts: know when a site stops getting traffic

Why silence is worth an alert

Traffic rarely drops to zero for a good reason. A tag removed in a redesign, a consent banner that blocks Analytics, a DNS change or an expired certificate all look the same in Google Analytics: nothing. Without an alert you find out days later, when a weekly report looks wrong and the data is already lost.

How SilenceRadar decides a site is silent

• It learns which hours of the week each site normally has visitors, from the last seven days.
• During those hours, a site with no realtime visitors for longer than your threshold (two hours by default) is marked quiet, and after twice that, silent.
• A site whose sessions today are far below the same weekday's level is also marked silent.
• Night-time lulls on a small site don't count, because those hours aren't normally active.

Down or broken tag

When a site goes silent, SilenceRadar requests its address (taken from the property's web data stream, or one you enter). If the site doesn't answer or returns an error, the alert says the site is down. If it loads normally, the alert says the tag is probably broken, which points you at the right fix straight away.

When visitors come back you get a second message, so you know the fix worked.

Where alerts go

Every alert goes to your account email. You can add more email addresses, a Slack channel through an incoming webhook, or any URL that accepts a signed JSON webhook. The Alerts page keeps a history of everything that was sent and where.

Questions