From sign-up to your first Telegram ping

Getting started

AiLookout is a web app. Nothing is installed on your computer; the browser that visits your target site runs on the AiLookout server and you steer it from your dashboard.

1. Register. Open Register, enter your email and a password.

2. Confirm your email. A confirmation link arrives in your inbox. Click it. Until you do, sign-in is refused.

3. Sign in. You land on the Dashboard.

The order of work is always the same: a target first (how to log in), then a watch on that target (what to look at), then a notification attached to the watch (where to send alerts). You can set up notifications at any point; the watch wizard lets you attach them later.

1Connect a target

A target is one website and one set of credentials. It remembers how to sign in and keeps the signed-in session, so every watch on that site shares it.

1. Go to Targets and press New target.

2. Fill in a Name (anything you like, for example "Helpdesk"), the Login page URL (the page with the sign-in form, not the page you want to watch), your Username and Password.

3. Optionally add a Logged-out marker: a short piece of text that appears only when you are signed out, such as "Forgot password?". AiLookout uses it to notice that a session has expired. Leave it empty if you are unsure; it is a hint, not a requirement.

4. Press Save. The target exists but does not know how to sign in yet.

Teach login

Instead of writing a script, you show AiLookout the three things it needs to click.

1. On the target page, press Open login page. A Remote browser panel appears and loads your login URL. This is a real Chromium browser running on the server, streamed to you as pictures; your clicks and keystrokes are passed through.

2. Browse freely if the login form is behind a "Sign in" link. Nothing is recorded until you press Teach login.

3. Press Teach login. The panel now lists four steps: click the username field, click the password field, click the sign-in button, confirm.

4. Click the username box. AiLookout types your saved username into it.

5. Click the password box. AiLookout types your saved password into it.

6. Click the sign-in button. The site signs you in.

7. Look at the remote view. If the page shows you are logged in, press Yes, save login. If something went wrong, press No, start over and teach again.

The saved session, Test login, Forget

When you confirmed the login, AiLookout also stored the browser's cookies and local storage for that site, encrypted. On every check it reuses that session and only replays the taught login when the site has signed it out (the page redirects to the login URL, shows the logged-out marker, or the login form is visible). Most checks never touch the login form at all.

• Test login in remote browser replays the taught steps from a clean session so you can watch them work. Use it after changing your password on the site.
• Forget login steps deletes the taught steps and the saved session. Your credentials stay. Teach again afterwards.
• Changed your password? Update it on the target and press Save. The next re-login uses the new value; the steps do not need re-teaching.

2Create a watch

A watch is one list on one page of a target. The wizard has five steps: Basics, Open the page, Pick the list, Name the fields, Save.

Basics

1. Go to Watches and press New watch.

2. Choose the Target. If the list is empty, create a target first.

3. Give the watch a name. It appears in square brackets at the start of every alert, so keep it short: "Helpdesk tickets".

4. Choose Check every: 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes, or 1 hour.

5. Tick the notifications under Notify via that should receive alerts. You can attach them later.

6. Press Next: open the page. The remote browser starts, signs in with the saved session and lands on the login URL.

Open the page

1. In the remote browser, navigate to the page you want to watch. Click menus, open the ticket list, apply filters, choose a sort order.

2. When the list you care about is on screen, press This is the page.

Pick the list

1. Click any cell of one row in the list. Not the header, not a button inside the row: a plain text cell is best.

2. AiLookout looks for the repeating structure around that cell. Every row it believes belongs to the same list is highlighted, and a chip shows the count, for example 3 rows found.

3. If the highlight covers the rows you expect, press Looks right. If it caught too much or too little, click a different row (or a different cell in the same row) and look again.

Name the fields

Fields are the cells inside a row that you want to read. At least one must be the key.

1. Click a cell inside one row, for example the ticket number. The wizard shows Picked: with the text it read.

2. Type a name for it ("Ticket") and, for the one that identifies the item, tick key. Press Add.

3. Repeat for the cells you want to see in alerts: Subject, Requester, Opened. Each becomes one line of the message. Remove a mistake with Remove.

4. Watch the Preview table underneath. It re-runs the selectors against the live page each time you add a field and shows the row count in its heading; press Refresh preview to run it again by hand. If it says the selectors matched no rows, go back and pick the list again.

Save and enable

1. Press Next: save. The summary shows the target, page URL, list selectors, fields, key, interval, channels and remembered clicks.

2. Press Save and enable. The watch appears in Watches with the badge New and runs within a few seconds.

3Telegram

Alerts are sent by a Telegram bot that you own. Creating one takes a minute and costs nothing.

1. In Telegram, open @BotFather and send /newbot. Follow the two prompts (a display name, then a username ending in bot).

2. BotFather replies with a token that looks like 123456789:AAH.... Copy it.

3. Open your new bot in Telegram and press Start (or send it any message). A bot cannot message you until you have messaged it once.

4. Back in AiLookout, go to Notifications and press Add notification, then pick Telegram. Give it a name and paste the token.

5. Press Detect chat id. AiLookout asks Telegram who has messaged the bot and fills in your chat id. If several chats appear, pick yours.

6. Press Send test. A hello message should arrive within a second or two. Press Save.

7. Attach it to a watch: tick it under Notify via in the watch wizard, or open an existing watch, tick channels under Channels and press Save.

One Telegram notification can serve many watches, and one watch can notify Telegram and email at the same time. The watch name in brackets tells you which watch fired.

Keyword rules, quiet hours and snooze

By default every new item alerts. A rule narrows that down to the items you care about, holds messages at night, or silences a watch for a while.

Keyword rules

1. Open a watch and find the Alert rules card (the same editor appears in the wizard's Save step).

2. Type words under Include keywords, separated by commas or new lines. An item alerts only if one of them appears. Words match whole words, case-insensitive.

3. Type words under Never alert when it contains to drop items even when they match. Exclude wins over include.

4. Optionally tick fields under Look in to search only those columns. None ticked means all fields.

5. Check the live preview: each current row shows Will alert, Skipped or Excluded by a term, with a count of how many would alert. Press Save rules.

With Alert when an existing item is edited to match ticked, an item that was skipped and is later edited to contain a keyword alerts at that point, marked Now matches. Power users can tick Treat as regular expressions; an invalid pattern is flagged before you save.

Quiet hours

1. In the same card, tick quiet hours and choose a start and end time, for example 22:00 to 07:00.

2. Matches found during quiet hours are sent as one digest when they end. In the event list they show Held for quiet hours until then.

3. Times use the time zone in Settings.

Snooze

On a watch page press 1h, 4h or 24h next to Snooze. Checks keep running and items are still recorded, but no messages are sent until the snooze ends. The watch shows Snoozed in the list; press Unsnooze to end it early.

Email and webhook notifications

Besides Telegram, Notifications can send by Email or to a Webhook. Pick the type when you press Add notification.

• Webhook: paste an incoming webhook URL (https) from Slack, a Teams workflow, n8n or Zapier. Choose Slack / Teams text for chat tools or AiLookout JSON for automations. An optional secret is sent as the X-AiLookout-Secret header.
• Email: enter a recipient address. Alerts are sent from the AiLookout mail address, so check spam the first time.

Both have Send test, and are attached to watches the same way as Telegram.

How polling works

Checks run on the server whether or not your dashboard is open. Nothing in a check involves AI; it is a replay of what you taught.

• Interval. Each watch is due again one interval after its last check finished. A check that takes a while does not pile up behind the next one.
• One browser per target at a time. Watches on the same target share one signed-in session, so they take turns. Two watches on one target with a one-minute interval will alternate rather than race the login.
• Session first, login second. The saved cookies are loaded, the page URL is opened, and only if the site shows the sign-in page (or the logged-out marker) are the taught login steps replayed. If that also fails you get a Sign-in failed notice.
• Baseline. The first successful check records every key and alerts nothing.
• One alert per new key. Each later check compares the keys on the page with the keys seen so far. Each unseen key becomes one message, carrying the named fields. The first message of a check also carries a screenshot.
• Cap plus summary. At most 10 individual messages are sent per check. If more items are new, one extra message lists the remaining keys ("12 more new items").
• Zero is suspicious. If a list that had items suddenly has none, the check is marked Suspicious and nothing is treated as resolved or new. A page that failed to load looks exactly like an empty list, so AiLookout refuses to draw conclusions from it.
• Three failures pause the watch. A failure is a check that could not sign in, could not find the list, or timed out (three minutes). After three in a row the watch is marked Broken, polling stops, and a Watch paused after repeated failures notice goes to its channels with the last error.
• Backoff. Between failures the wait doubles: interval x2, then x4, then x8, capped at one hour. A success resets it.

Health badges

• New

  Enabled but never run, or run but not yet baselined. Wait one interval.

• Ok

  The last check succeeded exactly as taught.

• Healed

  The last check succeeded, but only after a fallback: a locator had to be re-resolved, or the site had signed out and the login was replayed. Worth a glance; if it stays Healed, re-teach so the primary selectors match again.

• Broken

  Three consecutive failures. Polling is stopped. Open the watch, read the last error, re-teach if the page changed, and enable it again.

• Paused

  You switched it off. Nothing runs until you enable it. The baseline is kept, so re-enabling alerts only on items that arrived while it was off.

Troubleshooting

Privacy and security

Delete a target and everything under it (session, steps, watches, their snapshots) goes with it. Delete your account and all of it goes.

FAQ

Something missing? Create an account and try it on your own page; the remote browser shows exactly what AiLookout sees.