Static analysis is a powerful tool that examines your code without actually running it, catching bugs and type mismatches before they reach production. For PHP developers, PHPStan has become the go-to solution, and Laravel developers often use Larastan - a wrapper that adds Laravel-specific understanding to PHPStan. In this post, I'll share how I'm using PHPStan's type aliases feature to make validation rule typehints more readable and maintainable in our Laravel application. What is static a...| ohdear.app
The past few months, we’ve working on improving our uptime check. We proud to announce that this improved check is now available for all users. In this blogpost, I’d like to give an overview of the changes and some background why we changed some things.| Oh Dear
On the first of every month we generate an extensive PDF report for every site. This report contains a summary of all check results for the month and is a snapshot available to you and your team via email and the Oh Dear dashboard. We keep the report history so each month can be viewed in a browser or downloaded as a PDF. This report can also be emailed to any email address - not just team members - perfect for keeping your customers informed. Managing reports via API Up until now you could e...| ohdear.app
Every minute of website downtime cost large organizations an average of $9,000. That’s half a million dollars every hour, damn. And that’s just the average. If your organization heavily relies on your website to do business, that cost can increase even further. Needless to say, preventing website downtime is a top priority. Leading causes of website downtime Before we jump into ways of preventing website downtime, let’s first cover the leading causes of website downtime. If you can diag...| ohdear.app
We’ve added a new option to log in to Oh Dear: passkeys! When logging in using a passkey, you don’t have to type an email or password, and you won’t be redirect to a third party for logging in. It’s also super fast. How to use passkeys at Oh Dear Here’s me logging in to Oh Dear using a passkey. Your browser does not support the video tag. Cool right? If you want to use a passkey to login, just head over to your profile page and scroll down to the passkeys section. There you can crea...| ohdear.app
No one likes to admit it but we all hit snooze on the morning alarm every now and then. The same goes for Oh Dear alerts - sometimes you know that link deep in the docs will get fixed eventually but right now you're busy working on something else. Getting reminded every hour isn’t always helpful. Since April 2020, Oh Dear has allowed you to temporarily silence alerts for any check. Whether you’re managing a known outage or fighting some accessibility issues that is causing your Lighthouse...| ohdear.app
Unlike magnets, it's actually pretty straightforward. Let's take a quick look at how monitoring works and what kinds there are.| Oh Dear
By 2029, the maximum lifetime for a TLS certificate will be only be 47 days, compared to 398 days currently. Certificate management just got more cumbersome.| Oh Dear
Here's how we improved our test execution speed on GitHub Actions by splitting a test suite into equal chunks that run in parallel. This posts shows our entire GitHub workflow so you can improve the speed of your tests too.| Oh Dear
Get one-click fixes, interactive suggestions and links to docs right inside your broken links report. Plus some bonus crawl behaviour settings and some notification options coming soon..| Oh Dear
Why would I monitor my website in the first place? Your website is your business’ storefront, sales team, customer service department, and potentially even your primary revenue channel. Just like you’d protect the physical presence of these aspects of your business with a security system, you also need to protect the online aspects too. That means keeping an eye on your website with monitoring. How much does website downtime cost? When figuring out the cost of website downtime, there are ...| ohdear.app
Discover how we grew Oh Dear, our website monitoring SaaS, from a small startup to a profitable business. Learn what marketing strategies worked, what failed, and how we’re scaling through SEO, affiliate marketing, and SaaS review platforms.| Oh Dear
Detect and fix broken links with website monitoring tools to boost SEO, user experience, and credibility.| Oh Dear
Your status page is an important tool for communicating incidents and building trust with your customers. It's also an opportunity to reinforce your brand's identity. That’s why we’re excited to introduce new customization options for your status pages at Oh Dear! What’s New? With our latest update you can now customize your status page to match your brand's look and feel: Theming: Choose between Light, Dark, or System Mode to make your status page visually align with your website or us...| ohdear.app
Our unique broken links check has been updated to provide even more comprehensive monitoring for your websites! Oh Dear now checks CSS, JavaScript, and image links on every page to ensure every part of your site is running smoothly and error-free.| Oh Dear
Developers, marketing teams and business owners rely on Oh Dear to monitor their entire website and applications. We offer a feature-packed, all-in-one service with simple pricing - designed specifically for your peace of mind. Oh Dear already has a flexible and powerful notification system and to date has performed over 38 billion checks and sent over 19 million notifications across Email, Slack, MS Teams, PagerDuty, webhook and more. We respond to 30 different events across our services and...| ohdear.app
Keeping your website free of broken links is essential for good user experience and SEO - that's why Oh Dear monitors your entire website! Our broken links crawler will find and test all the links on your site and we keep going until we have checked everything! In addition to alerting you when you need it we have given our Broken Links feature a UI makeover! With this update it's now easier than ever to identify and resolve broken links across your site. Here’s a quick introduction of what ...| ohdear.app
At Oh Dear, we’re always looking for ways to make web monitoring easier and more efficient for our users. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Tag Notifications, a new feature that expands our notification options beyond site and team-level notifications. Why? For our larger customers using tags is an effective way to identify and manage multiple clients, projects, or environments. However, managing notifications by site or team can be too broad or too granular. For example, some sites...| ohdear.app
We know how crucial it is to provide clear and timely communication during incidents or downtime. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Status Page Update Templates - a new feature that makes it even easier to keep your users informed while maintaining a consistent message. Why use a status page A status page is a dedicated, Oh Dear hosted site where you can communicate the current status of your website or service to your users by posting status updates. It's a simple yet powerful tool f...| ohdear.app
We recently announced a new feature to enhance how you communicate with your users during maintenance, incidents, and general service updates. Status Page Templates allows you to save and re-use status updates - but how do you know what incidents might happen or what updates you need to keep users informed about until it's too late? We have put together a library of ready-to-use templates designed to keep your users informed with clear, concise and consistent messaging. Maintenance Incidents ...| ohdear.app
Oh Dear offers several ways to keep you updated on important events like downtime, performance and DNS changes, broken links, Lighthouse issues, and more. By default, you will get email notifications to the email address you used to sign up. But you can also choose to receive alerts to your preferred platform. A popular choice for many of our users is Microsoft Teams. But with the recent announcement from Microsoft about retiring the Office 365 Connectors within Microsoft Teams we had to prov...| ohdear.app
We know that keeping track of downtime and other failures across multiple sites can be a challenge, especially for larger teams. That’s why we’ve added filters to the 'History' page and introduced 'Team History' to make monitoring easier and more efficient! What’s New? Site History Filters Our updated History page now includes powerful filters that allow you to filter by: Time Period: Narrow down incidents to specific days, weeks, or months. Check Type: Focus on specific types of chec...| ohdear.app
Oh Dear can perform many checks: uptime, broken links, scheduled jobs, DNS, and much more. We proud to announce that we’ve added a new check: sitemap monitoring. This check will make sure that the structure of your sitemap is correct. We’ll also check if each and every link it links to a page that returns a correct response. Whenever we detect a problem, you’ll be notified via one of our many supported notification channels. What is a sitemap? Sitemaps play an essential role in SEO. Hav...| ohdear.app
One of the most unique features Oh Dear offers is the broken links and mixed content crawler. We will crawl your site for all links, reporting any broken pages to your defined notification channels. Recently, we encountered degraded performance with our crawler service due to a breaking change in an underlying library called Guzzle. This caused HTTP 505 responses on the first page of each site, blocking further crawling and resulting in false positive reports. Although our uptime service show...| ohdear.app
Our service can detect various problems with your website: whenever it is down, or a broken link is detected, your cron job isn't running on time, and much much more. Whenever we see a problem we can notify you via email, Slack, webhooks, and various other channels. Up until now, you could configure these notification channels in our UI, but now you can do this via our API as wel. What's new? Our comprehensive API documentation provides all the details you need to start managing your notifica...| ohdear.app
This week we introduced two new updates to enhance the user/team security administration. These updates focus on improving the Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) setup and visibility for team management. Let’s take a look. 1. View Your MFA Secret Key Previously, users could set up MFA by scanning a QR code, which seamlessly integrates an authentication app. Now, in addition to the QR code, we provide the ability to view and copy the secret key directly. This is especially useful if you prefe...| ohdear.app
Downtime has always been shown in minutes, hours, and days but for shorter downtimes you would see "0m" even if the actual downtime was less than a minute. We've updated the UI to show downtime in seconds. This means no more manually calculating brief outages — you’ll see exactly how long the system was down :) Did you know you can add notes to downtime periods?| ohdear.app
Over these past few weeks, we've updated our Ubuntu 20.04 LTS uptime servers to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The reason was mostly just staying up-to-date, but we had a surprising side-effect that was unexpected but very welcome. Measuring reduced CPU usage An easy riddle: can you guess when we were running on Ubuntu 20.04 and when we were on 22.04? The spikes in the middle were during the upgrades (when this server was taken out of rotation). For the exact same workload, here's how the numbers work out...| ohdear.app
We're in the process of upgrading some of our older uptime satellite servers that power our Uptime Monitoring from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. This is mostly a smooth process, but in case anyone's ever in a similar position, these are the steps we're taking to complete the upgrades. We should note: there's a lot of ways to upgrade servers, and the safest approach is to setup a brand new machine, move over your data, test things & then migrate your DNS records to the new server. Our clou...| ohdear.app
For each site and status page in your account, we now offer badges that you can use to show the status of your site or service everywhere you want. Technically these badges are svg's, so they are very lightweight to embed. The default badge The default badge shows the name of a site and its uptime status. Here's the actual badge for freek.dev Hopefully, freek.dev is up while you are reading this. Should freek.dev be down, the badge will be colored red. The small badge The small badge is a sma...| ohdear.app