ApifyForge Monitor vs Apify Built-In Monitoring

ApifyForge Monitor and Apify's built-in monitoring serve different purposes. Apify provides aggregate charts, threshold alerts, and status-based notifications for your own runs. ApifyForge Monitor extends this by adding per-run, real-time alerts for customer-triggered PPE failures. This page compares both tools — and Sentry as a third option — so you can choose the right setup for your actor portfolio.

What Apify's built-in monitoring provides

Apify's built-in monitoring includes several useful features:

• Aggregate success/failure charts for your actors over the last 30 days
• Threshold-based alerts when failure rates exceed a configured percentage
• Status-based notifications for runs you start from the console or API
• Static webhooks that fire on specific events for your own runs
• Historical run logs with full output and error details

These tools give you a solid overview of your actor fleet's health and are included at no extra cost with any Apify plan.

Where Apify's monitoring stops

Apify's built-in tools are designed around the actor owner's perspective. They cover runs you start yourself, but customer-triggered PPE runs fall outside that scope:

• Static webhooks only fire for the owner's runs, not customer runs
• Aggregate stats show percentages, not per-run error details
• No real-time push notifications (email or Slack) for individual failures
• No exit code diagnostics or custom error context in alerts

For developers who only run their own actors, this is sufficient. For PPE developers with paying customers, the gap matters.

What ApifyForge Monitor adds

ApifyForge Monitor extends Apify's monitoring with capabilities specific to PPE actor developers:

• Per-run alerts for every user's failures (yours and customers')
• Real-time email and Slack notifications within seconds
• Exit code diagnostics (OOM, timeout, exception, platform error)
• Custom error context from Actor.setStatusMessage()
• User ID tracking to identify which customer triggered the failure
• SUCCEEDED event monitoring for SLA tracking

Feature comparison table

When to use each tool

Use Apify's built-in monitoring when you need historical trends, aggregate failure rates, and you only care about your own test runs. It is free, requires no code changes, and gives you a long-term view of your actor fleet.

Use ApifyForge Monitor when you publish PPE actors and need to know when any customer's run fails. The real-time alerts and per-run error details let you fix issues before they cause churn.

Use Sentry when you need code-level stack traces and detailed JavaScript error tracking inside your actor logic. Sentry is useful for complex actors with many failure modes that need deep debugging.

The layered approach

No single tool covers all monitoring needs. The most reliable setups layer multiple tools together:

1. Apify dashboard for historical trends and aggregate health metrics
2. ApifyForge Monitor for real-time per-run failure alerts across all users
3. Sentry or similar APM for deep code-level error tracking when needed

This combination gives you the full picture: long-term trends from Apify, instant failure notifications from ApifyForge Monitor, and detailed stack traces from Sentry when you need to debug a specific issue.

Limitations of each approach

Apify dashboard limitations: No per-run alerts for customer runs. No real-time push notifications. Aggregate stats can mask individual high-severity failures.

ApifyForge Monitor limitations: Does not validate data quality or check output fields. No historical dashboards or trend analysis. Requires adding 1 line of code to each actor. Slack requires a paid plan ($9/month+).

Sentry limitations: Does not track Apify-specific events (TIMED_OUT, ABORTED). Does not cover customer runs unless the SDK is in the actor code. Adds SDK overhead. Starts at $26/month for the Team plan. Generates high-volume noise from non-critical warnings.

Alternatives

• DIY webhook handler: Write a custom HTTP endpoint that receives Apify ad-hoc webhooks and routes them to Slack or email. Full control, but requires 2-4 hours to build and ongoing maintenance.
• Apify static webhooks to Slack: Configure a static webhook in the Apify console to POST to a Slack incoming webhook URL. Simple, but only covers your own runs — not customer PPE runs.

For setup instructions, see the Setup Guide. For information on exit codes in alerts, see Exit Codes Explained.

Last updated: March 2026