🚨 Service Alerts Scraper — News Alerts & Disruption Monitor

The most versatile Service Alerts Scraper on Apify. Extract service alerts, disruption notices, and news alerts from any website — transit portals, energy exchanges, government sites, public transport authorities, and news portals. Get alert title, body, severity, status, dates, source, and direct link for every notice found. Filter by keyword, severity, and date. Pay only for results.

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📌 Table of Contents

• What Is This Actor?
• Why Use This Service Alerts Scraper?
• Supported Website Types
• Use Cases
• Input Parameters
• Output Fields
• Example Input & Output
• Filters
• Pricing
• Performance & Limits
• FAQ
• Changelog
• Legal & Terms of Use

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🔍 What Is This Actor?

Service Alerts Scraper is a production-ready Apify actor that extracts structured alert and notice data from any publicly accessible website — transit portals, energy market exchanges, government announcement pages, public transport authority sites, and general news alerts pages.

Provide one or many target URLs — from sites like TfL, MTA, EPEX SPOT, Deutsche Bahn, National Rail, or any custom portal — and receive back a clean, structured record for every alert found: title, body text, severity classification (High / Moderate / Low), status (Active / Planned / Resolved), date or date range, direct link, and source domain.

Apply optional filters for keyword, severity level, and date range to narrow results to exactly the alerts you need. This service alerts scraper automatically detects alert severity from content keywords and extracts dates from free-text, making it the most intelligent and flexible alerts monitoring tool available on Apify.

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🚀 Why Use This Service Alerts Scraper?

Feature	This Actor	Manual Monitoring	RSS Feeds	Other Scrapers
Service alerts from any website	✅	❌ Slow	⚠️ If available	⚠️
News alerts — any portal	✅	❌	⚠️	⚠️
Auto severity detection	✅ High/Moderate/Low	❌	❌	❌
Auto status detection	✅ Active/Planned/Resolved	❌	❌	❌
Date extraction from free text	✅	❌	⚠️	❌
Keyword filter	✅ Built-in	❌	⚠️	❌
Severity filter	✅ Built-in	❌	❌	❌
Date range filter	✅ Built-in	❌	❌	❌
Multi-URL batch	✅	❌	⚠️	⚠️
No login or API key	✅	✅	✅	✅

Bottom line: This service alerts scraper is the only actor that automatically classifies severity, detects alert status, and extracts dates from free-text — across any website type — with built-in keyword, severity, and date filtering in a single run.

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🌐 Supported Website Types

This news alerts scraper works on any publicly accessible page with structured or semi-structured content:

🚇 Public Transit & Transport

• Transport for London (TfL)
• MTA New York City Transit
• Deutsche Bahn
• SNCF Rail France
• National Rail UK
• BART
• Any local transit authority portal

⚡ Energy Markets & Exchanges

• EPEX SPOT
• EEX Energy Exchange
• Any national grid or energy market announcement page

🏛️ Government & Regulatory Sites

• Public notices and announcement portals
• Regulatory body alert pages
• Emergency services bulletins

📰 News & Media Portals

• Any news site or portal with article card layouts
• Industry-specific news feeds
• Press release pages

Any website not listed? If the page is publicly accessible and contains structured or semi-structured alert/news content, this actor can scrape it. The parser tries JSON-LD structured data first, then CSS card selectors, then a link-scan fallback — covering the vast majority of modern web layouts.

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🎯 Use Cases

🚇 Transit & Transport Monitoring

• Monitor public transport disruptions, cancellations, and service changes across multiple authorities
• Build automated alerts pipelines that notify operations teams when high-severity transit disruptions are detected
• Track planned engineering works and route diversions across a city's entire transit network

⚡ Energy Market Intelligence

• Scrape service alerts from energy exchanges for force majeure notices, market interruptions, and trading halts
• Monitor capacity reduction announcements and emergency maintenance notices from grid operators
• Build automated feeds of energy market news alerts for trading desks or risk management teams

🏛️ Government & Regulatory Compliance

• Monitor government portals for regulatory announcements, public notices, and policy changes
• Track emergency alerts and public safety notices from official government sites
• Collect regulatory update alerts for compliance monitoring across multiple jurisdictions

📊 Operations & Incident Management

• Feed service alerts into operations dashboards or incident management platforms
• Detect high-severity disruptions early by running scheduled scraper runs on critical infrastructure portals
• Aggregate alerts from multiple sources into a single structured feed for NOC or operations center use

🤖 Automation & Integration

• Schedule regular scraper runs to continuously monitor any set of service alert URLs
• Feed structured alert data into Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, or any notification system via Apify integrations
• Build a custom news alerts aggregator that monitors multiple portals and routes alerts by severity

🎓 Research & Analysis

• Collect historical disruption data for transport reliability studies
• Analyze energy market alert patterns and frequency for risk modeling
• Build datasets of public sector announcements for policy research

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⚙️ Input Parameters

{
  "target_urls": [
    "https://tfl.gov.uk/tube/status",
    "https://www.epexspot.com/en/news",
    "https://www.mta.info/alerts"
  ],
  "target_url":      "",
  "keyword":         "cancellation",
  "severity_filter": "High",
  "date_from":       "2024-03-01",
  "max_results":     50,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy":    true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
target_urls	array or string	[]	Website URLs to scrape — comma or newline-separated string also accepted
target_url	string	""	Single URL shortcut — merged into target_urls automatically
keyword	string	""	Filter alerts by keyword in title or body — e.g. "delay", "cancellation", "EPEX"
severity_filter	string	""	Filter by severity level — "High", "Moderate", or "Low". Leave blank for all
date_from	string	""	Filter alerts dated on or after this date — ISO format "YYYY-MM-DD"
max_results	integer	50	Maximum alerts to return across all URLs
proxyConfiguration	object	Optional	Apify proxy config — residential proxy recommended for government and transit sites

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📋 Output Fields

Every record from this service alerts scraper includes:

Field	Type	Description	Example
route	string	Route, line, service, or source name auto-detected	"Northern Line", "EPEX SPOT Market"
service_alert	string	Alert or notice headline (max 300 chars)	"Northern Line: Severe delays due to signal failure"
alert_body	string	Alert body or description text (max 500 chars)	"Trains are running with severe delays between..."
dates	string	Date or date range extracted from the alert	"2024-03-15", "2024-03-15 to 2024-03-17"
link	string	Direct URL to the full alert or article	"https://tfl.gov.uk/tube/status/..."
severity	string	Auto-detected severity level	"High", "Moderate", "Low"
status	string	Auto-detected alert status	"Active", "Planned", "Resolved"
source	string	Source domain	"tfl.gov.uk", "epexspot.com"
processed_at	string	Extraction timestamp (ISO 8601 UTC)	"2024-03-15T10:30:00Z"

🔴 Severity Classification

Severity	Keywords That Trigger It
High	emergency, critical, cancelled, suspended, shutdown, failure, disruption, force majeure, outage, evacuation, flood, fire, closure, major, severe
Moderate	delay, maintenance, repair, diversion, detour, modification, amendment, update, change, reduction, partial, limited, restricted, congestion
Low	advisory, information, notice, reminder, planned, scheduled, minor, improvement, enhancement, announcement

🟢 Status Classification

Status	Keywords That Trigger It
Resolved	completed, resolved, restored, ended, finished
Planned	planned, upcoming, future, scheduled for
Active	Default — all other alerts

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📦 Example Input & Output

Input:

{
  "target_urls":     ["https://tfl.gov.uk/tube/status"],
  "keyword":         "delay",
  "severity_filter": "High",
  "max_results":     5
}

Output (one record):

{
  "route":         "Northern Line",
  "service_alert": "Northern Line: Severe delays due to signal failure at Camden Town",
  "alert_body":    "Trains are running with severe delays between Euston and Morden. Use alternative routes where possible.",
  "dates":         "2024-03-15",
  "link":          "https://tfl.gov.uk/tube/status/northern-line",
  "severity":      "High",
  "status":        "Active",
  "source":        "tfl.gov.uk",
  "processed_at":  "2024-03-15T10:30:00Z"
}

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🔽 Filters

Keyword Filter

{ "keyword": "cancellation" }

Returns only alerts where the keyword appears anywhere in the title or body text. Case-insensitive. Works across all URLs in the batch.

Severity Filter

{ "severity_filter": "High" }

Returns only alerts classified at the specified severity level. Options: "High", "Moderate", "Low". Leave blank to return all severities.

Date From Filter

{ "date_from": "2024-03-01" }

Returns only alerts dated on or after the specified date. Useful for getting only recent alerts when running scheduled monitoring runs.

All three filters can be combined in the same run for highly targeted alert extraction.

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💰 Pricing

This actor uses pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for alerts actually extracted and pushed to the dataset.

Event	Price
Actor start fee	$0.02 per run
Per alert extracted	$0.008 per result ($8.00 per 1,000 alerts)

How billing works:

• ✅ The $0.02 start fee applies once per run regardless of results
• ✅ Each alert record pushed to the dataset is charged at $0.008
• ✅ Alerts filtered out by keyword, severity, or date filters are not charged
• ✅ The actor stops automatically when your Apify account charge limit is reached
• ✅ No free trial — pay only for what you extract, starting from your first result

Example: Extract 500 alerts = $0.02 (start) + $4.00 (500 × $0.008) = $4.02 total

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⚡ Performance & Limits

URLs	Alerts Per URL	Estimated Time
1 URL	up to 50	~30–90 seconds
5 URLs	up to 50 each	~3–6 minutes
20 URLs	up to 50 each	~12–25 minutes

• Results pushed to the Apify dataset immediately after each alert is processed
• Automatic delay between URLs to prevent rate limiting
• Residential proxy recommended for transit authority and government sites that restrict access
• The parser tries JSON-LD structured data first, then CSS card selectors, then link-scan — ensuring maximum coverage across all website types

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❓ FAQ

Q: Which websites does this actor work with? A: Any publicly accessible website with alert, notice, or news content — transit portals (TfL, MTA, Deutsche Bahn, SNCF), energy exchanges (EPEX SPOT, EEX), government announcement pages, and general news portals. If the page is publicly viewable and contains structured content, this service alerts scraper can extract it.

Q: How is severity detected? A: Severity is automatically classified from keywords in the alert title and body. Words like "emergency", "cancelled", "suspended", or "failure" trigger High severity. Words like "delay", "maintenance", or "diversion" trigger Moderate. "Advisory", "scheduled", and "planned" trigger Low. See the Severity Classification table above for the full keyword lists.

Q: How are dates extracted? A: The actor looks for <time> HTML elements, datetime attributes, and applies regex patterns to extract dates in multiple formats — DD/MM/YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD, and natural language formats like "15 March 2024". Date ranges (e.g. "15 March to 17 March") are also detected and returned as a single date range string.

Q: What happens when my charge limit is reached? A: The actor stops processing new alerts immediately and logs a clear message. Already-extracted alerts are safely saved to your dataset. On your next run with increased budget, the actor starts fresh.

Q: Can I filter for only active (non-resolved) alerts? A: Currently the severity_filter and keyword filters are available. Status-based filtering (e.g. Active only) can be applied after export using your dataset's filter tools or any spreadsheet application.

Q: Can I schedule this to run automatically? A: Yes. Set up an Apify scheduled task with your target URLs and filters to automatically collect fresh alerts on any interval — hourly, daily, or weekly.

Q: Can I export results to Excel or CSV? A: Yes. All results are pushed to the Apify dataset, which can be exported to JSON, CSV, Excel, and more directly from the Apify Console after each run.

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📜 Changelog

v1.0.0 (Current)

• ✅ Scrapes service alerts and news alerts from any publicly accessible website
• ✅ JSON-LD structured data extraction (primary method)
• ✅ CSS card selector parsing with 12+ selectors tried in priority order
• ✅ Link-scan fallback for non-standard page layouts
• ✅ Auto-severity detection from 40+ keywords across 3 severity levels
• ✅ Auto-status detection (Active / Planned / Resolved)
• ✅ Date and date range extraction from free text and HTML time elements
• ✅ Route/line/service name auto-detection
• ✅ Keyword, severity, and date-from filters
• ✅ Pay-per-event billing — charged per alert extracted
• ✅ Spending limit respect — stops automatically when user charge limit reached
• ✅ Real-time dataset push as each alert is extracted

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🏷️ Tags

service alerts scraper news alerts scraper transit alerts scraper disruption monitor service disruption scraper transit scraper energy alerts scraper government notices scraper alert monitoring service status scraper public transport alerts incident alerts scraper

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⚖️ Legal & Terms of Use

This actor accesses publicly visible alert and news content from websites in the same way a regular user browses those pages.

Please note:

• Use extracted alert data only for lawful purposes — operations monitoring, research, compliance, and journalism are common legitimate uses
• Respect each website's Terms of Service — do not use this tool at volumes designed to overload or disrupt any platform
• Alert content belongs to the respective organizations that publish it — do not republish scraped content without appropriate attribution
• The actor developer is not responsible for how extracted alert data is used or acted upon

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🤝 Support & Feedback

• Bug report? Contact us via the Apify actor page
• Feature request? Post in the Apify Community forum
• Loving it? Please leave a ⭐ review — it helps other users find this actor!

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Built with ❤️ on Apify
The most complete Service Alerts Scraper — any website, auto severity, keyword & date filters

💰 $0.02 per run + $8.00 per 1,000 alerts · Pay only for results