This guide is going to provide an overview of how to automate the exporting and saving of image screenshots of the UI for your Monitors. This specific example is going to demonstrate how to have them automatically saved in Google Drive but similar steps can be taken to upload these images to other cloud storage platforms (Dropbox, Box, etc.).
Note: If you’ve set up a "Zap(s)" using your ChangeTower account previously, you can skip the first few steps of this tutorial.
Step 1: Once you've created and/or logged into your Zapier account, click on the "+" icon in the upper left and "Make a Zap"
In the first step, you're going to have to search for ChangeTower as that's going to be the app that will trigger the workflow you're hoping to automate:
There is only going to be one option when using ChangeTower in the first step which is going to be 'New notification':
Note: If this is your first time using Zapier + ChangeTower, you will need to authenticate your account. You can find your unique API Token in the My Account section of the ChangeTower platform.
Once connected, you'll simply choose your account (you'll only have one choice) from the dropdown.
Optional: test the connection (note you will need to have at least one recent notification in your account's dashboard)
Step 2: This is an advanced step and only necessary if you're going to be applying this workflow to specific Monitor(s) and/or if you have multiple folders that you want to store images of 1 monitor-type and another folder for another monitor-type(s). This is really specific to your business's use case.
IMPORTANT: creating multi-step "Zaps" is a PAID feature on Zapier so if you do not have a paid account, you will hit a paywall before you're able to complete the setup. To get started, we recommend skipping this test if you're not a premium user on Zapier (you can always upgrade and add more complex Zaps later on if warranted).
Skip to Step X if this isn't necessary and/or if you do not have a paid Zapier account
In this example, we're going to add a filter and specify custom criteria so that the Zap (i.e. workflow) will only continue for some of our Monitors. In this instance we simply set it so that if the text in the Monitor Name contains "Zapier". Again, this is optional:
Step 3(a): Search for the cloud storage app where you would like your images to be uploaded and stored. In this example, we're choosing to use Google Drive and we're choosing the Action Event to be "Upload File".
Note that if you have not authenticated your Drive account previously, you will be prompted to do so here (not shown)
Once authenticated, you will tell Zapier in which folder you would like the images for this Zap to be uploaded. Note we created a folder for this example but you can certainly customize this.
Step 3(b): This next step is really a series of small steps in which you're going to tell Zapier what information you'd like to extract and for what purposes.
File: You will choose from a list of options available but in this instance, we're going to choose the "Link to the Full-page Image Screenshot"
Convert to Document: We do not want Drive to convert the image link to a Word file (it makes the image blurry) so we're going to select "False"
File Name: Here we choose to use the Monitor Name and Notification Date / Time as that's fairly intuitive.
File Extension: you can leave this blank
Step 4: Done Editing, make your Zap live, and set up a test Monitor to test it out!
