Check product-based data for correct format and duplicates

A step-by-step monitoring tutorial that shows you how to ensure your data is correctly formatted and unique. Visualize your data using the monitoring dashboard.

This example walks you through setting up monitoring for an actor or task.

Use case

You want regularly scrape product data using a single scraper.

You need:

• Data to always be in the correct format.
• Alerts if items are duplicated.
• Notification when your scheduled run times out or fails.
• Data visualization on a simple dashboard.

Let's say you're using the Amazon Crawler (vaclavrut/amazon-crawler) from Apify Store to get daily iPhone X offers.

You have set up a task named amazon-iphone-offers and set up a schedule named iphone-daily-offers. The schedule runs your task every morning, so you have fresh data ready when you wake up.

Create a new monitoring task

If you haven't already, add the monitoring suite to your account.

If you have already added the task, under its Settings tab, give it a name. For example, monitoring-iphone-offers, since we're monitoring the amazon-iphone-offers task.

We recommend prefixing your monitoring task names with monitoring- so you could identify them easier.

Monitoring configuration

1. Under your task's Input tab, set the Mode dropdown to Create configuration.

2. Next, open the What you want to monitor section. Give the monitoring suite a name in the Monitoring suite name field, e.g. iphone-offers.

3. In the Type of target: dropdown, select Task, since you will be monitoring an Amazon Crawler task.

4. Target name patterns should be the name of your task, amazon-iphone-offers.

5. Select the Notify me whenever actor/task does not succeed option to receive a report when a run finishes unsuccessfully.

Each of your monitoring suites must have a unique name.

This is what the configuration should look like:

Validate data

Let's say you need each item to always have properties such as title, ASIN, currency and a list of sellers.

1. Open the Validating by a schema section and select the Enable schema validation option.

2. In the Validation options field, create an object containing a schema key. As its value, set an object specifying the format of each of the properties you want to validate.

The monitoring suite uses the ow library for type validation. Make sure to import the library using /* global ow */.

Validation is done after each run finishes.

Check for duplicates

1. In the Check for duplicates section, select the Enable duplicate items check option.

2. Set the Unique keys field to asin to make sure all the ASIN properties are unique.

Set up data visualization

In the Statistics dashboard section, check the Enable dashboard option to activate data visualization.

Finally, click the Save & Run button. It will create a monitoring configuration and turn the monitoring ON.

Getting your results

Following each of your amazon-iphone-offers tasks runs, the suite will process your results and report if any of the checks fail. You receive an email with a link to your monitoring project dashboard.

Here, you can see the result statuses of your monitored tasks and filter them by time. You can also see each run's key-value store records and dataset item charts.

This is what your dashboard can look like after some time: