Monitors

This page guides you through creating, configuring, and managing monitors to track domains of interest.

Dashboard overview

The Iris Detect web interface opens to the Dashboard. The Dashboard lets you use the Search tool to perform a search and/or create a new monitor. It displays the monitor list, as well as links to domains with New, Changed, or Watched status.

From the Dashboard, select buttons on the navigation panel to view all domains in each category. Counts for the individual monitor’s main 3 lists are also available. To navigate to a Monitor’s Dashboard, click on an individual monitor.

Create a monitor

You can create monitors through the Iris Detect web interface (described below) or programmatically through the Iris Detect API.

Only users with editor access can add and edit monitors.

To create a monitor:

1. Enter the keyword to monitor, such as a portion of its name, in the search bar
2. Iris Detect loads the Search and Evaluate page
3. Select the Refine Results button to see options for enhancing the monitor’s effectiveness

Configure Match Variations

When you enable Match Variations, the monitor includes domains where variations of the term are substrings within matched domains. See How domain matching works for detailed guidance on when to use this setting.

The search results update to show how your refinements impact the results.

Add exclusions

Text Exclusions remove results when an exclusion string appears in the second-level domain, such as example in example.com. They don’t match top-level domains (TLDs). For example, monitoring election includes domains containing selection; adding selection excludes those domains. An exclusion of xyz can exclude xyz.com or myxyz.net, but it doesn’t exclude every domain using the .xyz TLD. Text exclusions can reduce false positives in the results.

A domain can match your monitor term through its TLD, including a match that spans the dot between the second-level domain and TLD. Text exclusions still apply only to the second-level domain. See Full domain matches.

Name Server Exclusions exclude a domain, but only when you add all of the domain’s nameservers. Exclusions can remove trusted infrastructure from the results. Wildcards (*) are accepted: for example, *.domaintools.com catches ns1.domaintools.com and ns2.domaintools.com.

Save the monitor

Select the Add Monitor button to save your monitor to your organization’s dashboard, where it will be accessible to all other users in your organization.

Edit monitors

To edit a monitor, select the Overflow Menu (three vertical dots) on the right side of the Monitor’s row. Select Edit to load the monitor’s search criteria, and save.

You can also update monitors programmatically through the Iris Detect API.

Delete monitors

To delete a monitor, select the Overflow Menu (three vertical dots) on the right side of the Monitor’s row and select Delete.

You can also delete monitors programmatically through the Iris Detect API.

Understand monitor results

After creating a monitor, Iris Detect organizes matching domains into groups based on their status. Using the Iris Detect API, you can return domains from specific lists as needed.

See the Key concepts section for descriptions of each domain category (New, Watched, Changed, Inactive, Previous, Escalated, Ignored).