I’ve been building sites and starting projects for … too many years now. Let’s say 20 years as a conservative estimate. I’ve collected dozens of sites for work, hobbies, side-projects, and for various family members.
It’s always been a pain to keep track of them. At least one site every year gets hacked and falls victim to a bad plugin, or some mistake I’ve made.
So I’ve been making full use of the “Global Alerts” we’ve just built at Logtivity.
Logtivity can send you instant email and Slack notifications whenever anything important happens. With “Global Alerts” you can set up these notifications once and use them for all your sites.
For example, I have Logtivity installed on over 50 sites and want to get notified when an Administrator logs in to one of those sites. Some of these sites don’t have content updates for years and should not have anyone logging in. If an Administrator does login, it’s a bad sign and I want to know quickly.
This image below is an example of that Global Alert. As you can see, the set up is pretty straightforward.
This alert is now active across all my sites. Whenever an Administrator logs in to any of my 50 sites, I’ll get a Slack notification that looks like this:
You can see three buttons underneath the alert:
- View/Edit Alert: This will take you to the screen where you can update these alerts.
- View Logs: This button will show you all your logs that match “User Logged In” and “Administrator”.
- View User: This will display all the activity for the user who triggered this alert.
Check out this video guide to Logtivity alerts:
More Examples of Global Alerts
My approach to using these alerts is to set up notifications for anything that might go wrong on my sites.
For example, I can use this feature to get alerts every time a theme filed is edited on one of my sites. This is something that should rarely (if ever) happen on an WordPress site unless it’s in development. In the image below, the Action is “Theme File Edited”.
And this next image shows the alert I’ll get if a theme file is modified.
One more example if new plugin installations. If I have a site set up for a family member, there’s a good chance I do not want them messing with it. Please don’t get installing any random plugins! So I’ve also set up a Global Alert for new plugin installations. This image shows the simple set-up for the alert:
This final image shows the notification that I’ll get in Slack if a family member goes rouge and installs that unwanted carousel slider plugin!
Summary of Global Alerts
Because Logtivity tracks the activity on all your WordPress sites, it can monitor those logs and send you notifications for key events. Last year, we saw a WordPress site get hacked in 38 seconds. We learned from reading the logs and many of those lessons were implemented in this new “Global Alerts” feature.
If you’re curious, this is one part of a series on building Logtivity. Every couple of months, I’ll post more about the progress we’re making. If you’re curious, check out our WordPress activity log at Logtivity.io.