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Troubleshooting monitoring results

Investigate false positives, redirects, timeouts, TLS or domain unknown states, sitemap issues, heartbeat pings, and keyword mismatches.

Last updated: 2026-07-13 Customer help page

False positives

Start by checking the monitor URL, expected status code, timeout, redirects, maintenance windows, and whether the target site behaves differently for automated requests.

Redirects

Redirects can change the final URL, status code, response time, or keyword content. Verify both the original URL and final destination.

Timeouts

Timeouts can be caused by slow origin responses, overloaded servers, network issues, blocking rules, or too aggressive timeout settings.

SSL/TLS warning or unknown

TLS checks can show warning or unknown when certificate data is delayed, provider-limited, unavailable, or not clearly confirmed. Investigate certificate expiry, chain validity, and recent provider state.

Domain expiry unknown or source-limited

Domain expiry data depends on registry and RDAP availability. Unknown does not always mean expired; it means Watchfox could not confidently confirm the expiry state from available sources.

Sitemap broken links

Check sampled URLs, response status classes, redirects, and whether the sitemap contains old or non-public URLs.

Heartbeat missing ping

Verify that the scheduled job is running, calls the correct heartbeat URL, and runs within the expected interval.

Keyword mismatch

Check exact text, case sensitivity, redirects, server-side rendering, authentication walls, cookie banners, and whether the monitored page returns different content to automated requests.

Keyword checks request a fresh response without adding cache-busting query parameters. Watchfox sends a no-store/no-cache request through its probe path, but an origin, WordPress page-cache plugin, reverse proxy, or external CDN can still return an older HTML variant or behave differently for automated requests.

When a keyword mismatch is recorded, Latest issue evidence can include the response body size and bounded cache headers such as Age, Cache-Control, CF-Cache-Status, X-Cache, ETag, and Last-Modified. If a browser already shows the new text, compare the final URL, test the page while signed out, and purge or revalidate the site/CDN cache before treating the result as a Watchfox parsing error.

When contacting support

Include org_id, project_id, monitor_id, timeframe in UTC, affected URL, expected behavior, actual behavior, and screenshots if useful. Never send secrets or private tokens.