A couple months ago, we sent out a survey to all our users asking what they like about Oh Dear, how they use it, and how we could improve our service. One of the things that was asked a lot was ping and TCP port monitoring. The past few months we worked hard to add this kind of monitoring to our service. And while building it, we touched upon other parts of our service and improved lots of little things. And I'm proud to share that we now have shipped it all! Let's go through it! Goodbye site...| ohdear.app
Today, we've launching a new PHP SDK package, which has been rebuilt from scratch using the wonderful Saloon library. Using our new SDK, you can easily use the entire Oh Dear API.| ohdear.app
We've launched notification logs to help you track all the notifications Oh Dear sends you. You can now see how many notifications each channel has sent and view detailed logs of what was sent when.| Oh Dear
Let's dive into SEO performance monitoring and how to get started.| Oh Dear
On Tuesday the 22nd of July around 09:00 UTC, our users have experienced a slower-than-usual website, API and application. This continued until the next day, July 23rd and was ultimately resolved around 17:30 UTC. This post highlights the cause and the fix we've applied. There were several misleading metrics that caused this issue to last longer than we'd have expected that make for an interesting retrospective. As is always the case when debugging: sometimes it's hard to distinguish cause fr...| ohdear.app
A few weeks ago, we sent a survey out to all our users asking what they like about Oh Dear, how they use it, and how we could improve our service. If you didn't get it, you can still fill out our survey. It only takes a couple of minutes. Currently, we can monitor the uptime of any HTTP(s) site. In our survey, our users mentioned that they'd like to use Oh Dear to also monitor MySQL, email, Redis, or any other kind of server. That's why we're working on adding ping and TCP monitoring. Instead...| ohdear.app
More payment options means more people can use Oh Dear, here's an updated overview of all our accepted methods.| Oh Dear
A critical security vulnerability was recently discovered in Livewire v3 that allows remote code execution, as Stephen Rees-Carter reported on Securing Laravel. While patches are released quickly, many applications remain vulnerable because developers simply don't know about the issue yet. Oh Dear's Application Health monitoring solves this by continuously checking your production environment for security vulnerabilities and immediately notifying you when issues are detected. For Laravel appl...| ohdear.app
When you're managing a handful of client sites, setting things up manually is fine. Though if you're managing dozens of them, you're going to think twice about your approach. For agencies, development teams and platforms who are responsible for loads of websites, having to repeat the same configuration over and over is not only inefficient but also more prone to errors. That’s where this blog post comes in handy. While Oh Dear doesn’t offer templates via the UI (yet) you can achieve prett...| ohdear.app
Clients expect transparency, especially when things go wrong. But manually updating a status page during an incident or maintenance window slows you down when speed matters most. Oh Dear’s status pages are more than just a pretty uptime dashboard. They’re fully API-driven and designed to scale with your workflow. Whether you manage five client sites or five hundred, you can create, update and sync status pages as needed. Before we get into it, you can find everything there's to know about...| ohdear.app
You can now verify the final redirect URL in your Oh Dear uptime settings| Oh Dear
If there's something wrong with your site, we can now notify you via Google Chat| Oh Dear
Uptime monitoring with broken links and mixed content checking, performance metrics, certificate monitoring, status pages, SEO checks and scheduled task monitoring. Monitor your entire website, not just the homepage.| ohdear.app
Today we are releasing oh-dear-api-examples a brand-new open-source repository on GitHub. It curates bite-size scripts, helpers and ideas for helping you bulk-manage your Oh Dear account via the API. https://github.com/ohdearapp/oh-dear-api-examples How it works Installation in under a minute just following the README.md or: git clone https://github.com/ohdearapp/oh-dear-api-examples.git cd oh-dear-api-examples cp .env.example .env npm install Just clone → npm install → start interacting ...| ohdear.app
SURF is a Duth IT cooperative in service of educational and research institutions. In essence, they help out these organizations by vetting and building software and other tools that best suit their needs. For years they offered a website monitoring service of their own, SURFopzichter, to affiliated institutions. As of February 1, 2025, the application has been sunset. Since there are plenty more modern alternatives on the market that offer the same services, SURF now refers its members to Oh...| ohdear.app
Managing dozens (or hundreds) of client sites can quickly become chaotic without the right tools. Whether you're running an agency, internal platform team or dev shop, visibility and control are everything. That's where Oh Dear comes in. Oh Dear is an all-in-one monitoring service that gives you a unified dashboard for uptime checks, performance monitoring, broken link detection, SSL and domain expiry alerts, scheduled task validation and more. But beyond just running checks Oh Dear also give...| ohdear.app
We are pleased to announce the introduction of team-level Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). With our latest update, owners now have the ability to enforce MFA for all team members. This means you can ensure that every user accessing your account is taking the necessary steps to protect sensitive information. How it works As the team owner select 'Manage team' from the main menu Navigate to the 'Security' tab and toggle 'Require two factor authentication' and hit 'save' All users will now be ...| ohdear.app
Oh Dear's robust API provides endpoints that enable programmatically accessing nearly all features available on the web UI. One thing that needed to be added was the ability to read all notification settings in your account. A few of our users requested this; it made sense to add this, so we did just that. A benefit of choosing a smaller company like Oh Dear (we're only two people) is that we can move very fast and quickly add features when customer requests come in. Because the results of th...| ohdear.app
During the week of Black Friday, Oh Dear is free to all new users until we've proven our value to you.| Oh Dear
Uptime monitoring with broken links and mixed content checking, performance metrics, certificate monitoring, status pages, SEO checks and scheduled task monitoring. Monitor your entire website, not just the homepage.| Oh Dear
An overview of all the checks Oh Dear can perform for your websites.| Oh Dear
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
Recently, people started talking about a malware called “Androxgh0st” specifically targeting Laravel apps. In a recent edition of Securing Laravel, Stephen Rees-Carter wrote a good explanation of how it works. The malware targets apps with APP_DEBUG set to true. When enabled, Laravel will give detailed error messages, and some security features will be disabled. In production, you always want this value to be set to false. You can make sure it's always set to' false' using Oh Dear’s app...| ohdear.app
Today, we released the ohdearapp/ohdear-pulse package, which contains Laravel Pulse cards to show you the status of your scheduled jobs, any broken links you have in your Laravel app, and uptime / HTTP performance stats. All of these cards use the Oh Dear API to fetch their data. Laravel Pulse is a first party package that can display a dashboard with information surrounding usage and performance of your Laravel app. Here’s how a default installation looks like. Discovering the cards The fi...| ohdear.app
As you probably know, Oh Dear is run by a small but capable team. One of the advantages of being small is that we can implement stuff pretty quickly: there’s no red tape, and our code base is very healthy. So, when our users have feature requests that make sense to add to Oh Dear, we can move fast. In the past month, we implemented two smallish feature requests for our DNS check we got through support. Here’s what our new DNS settings screens look like. The first option, monitoring differ...| ohdear.app
We are happy to announce that we have upgraded our Lighthouse check from v9 to the latest version, Lighthouse v11. Lighthouse is an open-source tool by Google that helps developers improve the quality of their web pages. Oh Dear can run this check frequently for your site, informing you when SEO-related problems arise. Our check may suggest optimizing images or minifying JavaScript to improve performance. By implementing these suggestions, a website can become faster, more accessible, and mor...| ohdear.app
Besides monitoring your site's uptime, Oh Dear offers many other checks to monitor all kinds of aspects of your web app. One of those checks is our DNS check. Whenever we detect problems with your DNS records or when one of the DNS records changes, we can notify you. By default, we only monitor the DNS records of the domain you are monitoring. So when you're monitoring example.com, we'll only monitor the records of that hostname. A CNAME record is a special kind of DNS record. It can be looke...| ohdear.app
The most popular check that Oh Dear offers is, without a doubt, our uptime check. It's enabled for almost every site we monitor. By default, this check will notify you when your site returns a non-2xx response, but you can greatly customize that behavior. You can check if the response has certain headers, if the response contains a particular string, and more! Some of our users requested a new behavior: checking the absence of a string on the response. We're happy to share that we've now adde...| ohdear.app
We're proud to announce that we started our affiliate program. Using this program, you can generate a link (like https://ohdear.app?via=your-name) that you can include in your blog posts, tweets, or anywhere on the web. If somebody clicks that link and subscribes to Oh Dear in the next 30 days, you'll get 25% of the revenue of the first year of that subscription. The more people subscribe via your link, the more money you earn. When you create your affiliate account, you'll get access to a ni...| ohdear.app
Whenever we detects something wrong with your site it can send you a notification. We have multiple channels available: Slack, Telegram, webhooks, and many more. The most popular channel our users use is just a simple mail. Behind the scenes, Oh Dear uses Postmark to send out mails. Postmark will inform us whenever a notification mail results in a hard bounce. A hard bounce means that the mail won't be delivered. The most common reason for this is that the mailbox doesn't exist (anymore). Thi...| ohdear.app
Since Oh Dear was launched, we offered a traditional login using the familiar email and password combination. Today, we've launched our social login. This feature allows you to use your Google or GitHub account to log into Oh Dear. You'll see these two new buttons on the registration and login page. When clicking one, we'll use your Google or GitHub account to log in. When logging in, we'll search for an Oh Dear account whose email matches the email used for your Google / GitHub account. Usin...| ohdear.app
When we make a request to your site to verify that your site is up, the response of your server will contain certain headers. We can verify that those headers contain the values you expect. If these expectations are not met, we'll consider your site as down. In the "Responses" section of the uptime settings page, you can specify which headers we should verify. You could add this expectation to ensure your page uses gzip compression. If you want to verify that a particular header is set on the...| ohdear.app
When we detect a problem with your site, we can notify you via mail, a Slack message, a webhook, or any of our other notifications channels. This is enough for most of our users, but those who work in larger teams often need more flexibility. Today, we are launching our PagerDuty integration. PagerDuty is a cloud-based incident management platform that helps organizations improve operational reliability by providing real-time alerts, on-call scheduling, and incident tracking. Once the PagerDu...| ohdear.app
Next to the many checks we can perform, we can also render beautiful status pages to inform your audience about the health of your service. Today, we've deployed a redesign of these status pages. In this iteration, everything is more polished. We picked a new font and colors and added some icons to make the status page a bit more visually interesting. In addition to the cosmetic upgrade, we also added a significant new feature. We can now display 60 days of uptime history for your sites. Here...| ohdear.app
One of our unique monitoring features is that we crawl your entire site to discover links that might be broken. When we discover a broken link, we'll send you a notification and display every broken link in our Broken Links Report. We've made a nice quality-of-life improvement to that Broken Links Report. In addition to displaying the broken link URL and the page on which that broken link was found, we now also display the link text of that broken link. That link text will greatly help you to...| ohdear.app
Oh Dear offers many checks to ensure your website is healthy. The most popular check that is active for almost every site we monitor is the uptime check. When the uptime check detects that your site is down, it will notify you via one of our many available channels. The check will also create a downtime period visible on the uptime check results page. Here's what those downtimes might look like. The screenshot above shows the new little feature we introduced: you can now add notes to downtime...| ohdear.app
When we detect a problem with your site we can notify you via mail, a slack message, a webhook, or any of our other notifications channels. For most of our users this is enough, but those work in larger teams often need more flexibility. Today, we are launching our Opsgenie integration, a modern incident management platform. Opsgenie’s on-call scheduling allows you to set up escalation policies, so that if a notification isn’t handle within a certain timeframe, it will automatically be es...| ohdear.app
One of the unique features of Oh Dear is that we crawl your entire site and report any broken links. Our broken links report had two main categories: external broken links: these are links on your site that point towards a page on another site internal broken links: these are links on your site that point towards a non-existing page on your own site In both categories, the problem is caused by something related to the site's content. In most cases, a page you're linking to was removed or arch...| ohdear.app
We implemented a small, but valuable feature requested by some of our users. You can now store some free form notes on a site. When heading over a site's settings, you'll see the new "notes" field. Here you can add some important information to the site, for example, some details on the SLA or technical details, ... When you saved notes on a site, we'll show it when hovering over the site on the site list. Of course, you can also get to these notes via the API. If you're not using Oh Dear to ...| ohdear.app
A few months ago, we totally redesigned our service. We didn't to this on our own, but got help from our friends at Digital With You. On their site, they published an in-depth case study on how they rewrote marketing copy, chose new colours and redesigned entire pages. Check it out: https://digitalwithyou.com/cases/oh-dear| ohdear.app
Changing the owner of the team can now be done in our UI In the past, we've seen users reach out to support to change the owner of a time for a variety of reasons. You can now change the owner of the team without contacting support. Just head over to the team settings and scroll down. As the owner of a team, you can move ownership to another member of your team. Because this action cannot be reversed, it needs to be confirmed. If you're not using Oh Dear to monitor your site, now's the perfec...| ohdear.app
In this sponsored talk given at Laracon India 2023, I demo all major Oh Dear features. After that, I share how the Laravel app behind Oh Dear is structured using domains. The audio quality is not perfect, but it should still be understandable.| ohdear.app
Some of our users have a lot of sites in their Oh Dear account. A feature often requested is the ability to add a little bit of meta information about each site. To do that, we've introduced the ability to add tags to a site. Tags can be used for instance how important it is to fix a problem with the site immediately. Possible tags could be important or has support contract. Another use case would be to add the technology used, tags could be named wordpress, laravel, js. When adding a site to...| ohdear.app
In addition to performing various checks to monitor your site, Oh Dear also offers beautiful status pages. Status pages can now use multiple languages. Using these status pages, you can inform your audience about the status of your service. Here's the beautiful Oh Dear powered status page of the Laravel team. Some of our users have a global, multi-lingual audience. That's why we now added support for a status page to be displayed in multiple languages. If you want to translate your status pag...| ohdear.app
Oh Dear has an extensive API that powers various powerful integrations. To use the API, you first need to create an API Token in the Oh Dear UI. Previously, such a token could be used to make API calls to any site or status page in your Oh Dear account. We noticed that some of our users are agencies that use Oh Dear to monitor their clients' sites. When such an agency passes an Oh Dear API Token to one of their clients, then that client could potentially use the broadly scoped token to view t...| ohdear.app
We're proud to announce we have added a new check to our service: Lighthouse SEO. Using this check you can detect (and get solution suggestions) for SEO and performance problems. What is Lighthouse Lighthouse is a tool provided by Google for improving the quality of web pages. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more. One of the key benefits of this check is that it provides specific, actionable suggestions for improving the quality of a website. For e...| ohdear.app
As of today, Oh Dear is in a brand new jacket. We've totally redesigned Oh Dear's UI. Our app doesn't only look better, but we've also made it much easier to use. We feel that our new design should speak for itself, so we highly recommend visiting the home page, browsing a bit around, register an account, or log in, and discover the redesigned app yourself. If you've been using Oh Dear before, you'll notice that we polished everything, and the UX should be much better. To read more about why ...| ohdear.app
Earlier this year, we announced that one of our goals for this year is to bring the UI of Oh Dear to the next level. Behind the scenes, our team is working hard on a complete rewrite of our marketing website and app. We're currently targeting the end of September timeframe to launch our redesign. In this blog post, we'd like to give you a preview of the redesign. The marketing site One of the most important pages is, of course, the homepage. Here's what our current one looks like. And here's ...| ohdear.app
In a typical Laravel application, you'll likely to have many routes, config files and possible some events. In your development environment these routes and config files will loaded and registered in each request. The performance penalty for this is not too big. In a production environment, you want to cache these things. Laravel makes this easy by offering a couple of Artisan commands that you can use in your deployment procedure. php artisan optimize # will cache routes and config php artis...| ohdear.app
When registering a domain name, you could assume it is yours forever. Unfortunately, this is false, and most domains must be renewed periodically. If you fail to do this, you risk losing your domain, and ownership could be transferred away from you. Oh Dear's new Domain check can send you a notification days before your domain expires. This way, you still have time to renew it. Introducing RDAP To monitor domain names, we rely on RDAP, which stands for Registration Data Access Protocol. It is...| ohdear.app
In the previous blog post I talked about how we are implementing the Oh Dear redesign. In this post I go into more detail on why and how we implemented a tailwind-like color system which supports all the colours used throughout the redesign. From Sketch to code One of the tasks that needs to be done to go from design to code is extracting the colours used in the design. In our case, the designer already put together a specific palette of colours and defined it within the Sketch file. We copie...| ohdear.app
When you log in Oh Dear, you'll notice a new little search field in the header. When you click that, it opens up a nice command palette. You can use this to navigate to anywhere in our service quickly. If you want to go to the performance graph of your site, just type "performance", ... ... and type the site's name you want to see the performance results of. When selecting the site, you'll get taken to the performance results. In many cases, this is much faster than clicking on the site and t...| ohdear.app
Next to a large collection of checks, Oh Dear offers the ability to easily create beautiful status pages. This way, you can communicate the status of your sites and services to your users. Take a look at the Oh Dear powered status pages for Flare and Laravel. Today, we added the ability to view the status page as JSON (or XML if that is your thing). You just have to append /json (or /xml to the status page URL. So for the Laravel status page, you'll find the JSON at status.laravel.com/json. H...| ohdear.app
In the previous blog post I gave an introduction about the project setup for the redesign of the new Oh Dear frontend. In this blog post I would like to show you how we are implementing the redesign of the Oh Dear frontend. Feel free to provide feedback on the design choices and statements made in this and future blog posts. We’d love to hear what you think of it. It all started with Sketch Before we started the build process we had every page redesigned upfront by the talented team of DWY....| ohdear.app
Using Oh Dear you can create beautiful status pages. As from today, you can let your users also subscribe to updates on those status pages. In this blog post we'll tell you all about it. Subscribing to status pages updates In addition to monitoring your site, Oh Dear also provides status page. Here's how such a status page looks like. Click here to view it in your browser. Don't let that URL fool you: "status.flareapp.io" could make you think it's served by the Flare, but that domain points i...| ohdear.app
We are currently rebuilding the Oh Dear website and application frontend. The goal is to go next level in aesthetics and user experience. The Oh Dear redesign will be launched later this year. In this post, you'll read more about the project setup and tools used. This is the first blog post of a series that will share progress and the knowledge gained along the way. Creating the design To help us come with the new design, we called upon the talented team of Digital With You - DWY. They first ...| ohdear.app
We're growing the team at Oh Dear with two very strong additions: Nick and Sean. Ever since we started Oh Dear (almost 5 years ago 😱) we've been adding new features, scaling out our infrastructure and growing our user base. That growth has lead us to two important realisations: Slowly but surely, Oh Dear is growing beyond our ability to manage it with just Freek & Me (Mattias) The growth has provided us the funding to look for strong hires to enhance our team As a result, we're very proud ...| ohdear.app
We're proud to announce that we have added a major new feature to Oh Dear: Application Health monitoring. Using Oh Dear, you can now monitor various aspects of your application and server. This way, you could get alerts when: disk space is running low the database is down the load on your server is too high Redis cannot be reached mails cannot be sent there are many application errors in a small timeframe (via Flare) whenever the load crosses a certain threshold a reboot of your server is req...| ohdear.app
We launched in January of 2018, and not a year has gone by where we made significant improvements to our service. Last year we wrote a recap of everything that we did in 2020. With the end of 2021 quickly approaching, let's take a look at all the things we did in the past 12 months. Adding more uptime check locations As Oh Dear is gaining popularity, we see that new users come from all continents. An uptime checker server does the uptime check and performance measurement. For each site, you c...| ohdear.app
We can now notify you of changing DNS records and let you know when we've detected a problem with your domain nameservers. Woohoo! 🥳 What is DNS record monitoring? Behind just about every website is a translation service that converts what we humans can read (the "domain name") to something a computer can interpret (the "IP address"). This conversion or translation is crucial to the functioning of your website. If the Domain Name Service (DNS) does not work properly and can't translate the...| ohdear.app
A good deal of sites redirect visitors to a specific more relevant page. Think, for instance, of a site that redirects you from / to a page in a relevant language, for instance /en or /nl. A single redirect is often not a problem, but having multiple redirects in a chain can hinder your site's user experience. Modern browsers also limit the number of redirects. At our uptime check settings screen, we've added a new option that allows you to specify how many redirects your site can have before...| ohdear.app
When something is wrong with your site, we can already notify you via a lot of different channels: mail, Slack, SMS, Webhooks, ... Today, we're adding support for Telegram notifications. We've polished the entire connection flow and made the notifications themselves interactive. To get started, click the Telegram notification channel at either the team or site level. First, you need to invite @OhDearAppBot to your Telegram channel. Next, you must copy the start command we generated and paste ...| ohdear.app
If you've been using Let's Encrypt for a while, you may have noticed that their certificates are signed by a root certificate titled DST Root CA X3. That root certificate is set to expire in a few hours. Any certificates still signed by that root will no longer be valid. But luckily, that shouldn't form a problem for most Let's Encrypt users. For a while now, new SSL issuances by Let's Encrypt have issued certificates against DST Root CA X3 (the one that is about to expire) and ISRG Root X1. ...| ohdear.app
Under the hood, Oh Dear is a large Laravel application that performs many queries all of the time. To power future features, we've recently changed our database structure and refactored some pieces in our code base. We increased performance by decreasing the number of queries. As an Oh Dear user, you've probably not noticed any changes. Our UI has always been very responsive. Most of the changes impacted the work that we perform on a queue, which is where 99% of our workload happens. To learn...| ohdear.app
Keeping an eye on your site and sending you a notification when it goes down is one of the core features of Oh Dear. Under the hood, we'll send a request to your site and take a look if the response code is in the 200-299 range, which is the default response code range to indicate that everything is ok. Some of our users are monitoring password protected sites. In such cases, the web server might reply with status code 401 (unauthorised). Sure, extra headers can be specified on Oh Dear to hin...| ohdear.app
Like most SaaS products, Oh Dear is a living platform. We add new features proposed by our users, fix bugs that get reported, and regrettable also sometimes introduce new bugs. Most users use email to communicate with us. Even though sending an email is often perceived as friction-free, it can be a minor hurdle. We've introduced a little support bubble at the bottom of every page to make it easier for our users to pass us feature requests and report bugs. When you click the support bubble, a ...| ohdear.app
When we detect something wrong with your site (it is down, a broken link is detected, the certificate is invalid, ...), we can notify you via one of the many notification channels we support. One of those channels is Pushover, an excellent service to send native notifications to mobile devices. We have supported Pushover since we launched a couple of years ago. Now, we've added a nice option that several of our users we're asking for: setting the priority. When you define Pushover notificatio...| ohdear.app
Our users sometimes have a large number of applications that are being monitored by Oh Dear. Some of these applications are related to each other. Think for instance of a marketing site and an API that are part of the same application. To better emphasise that some of the things that are monitored are related, you can now use groups. When you start monitoring a site at Oh Dear, you can now optionally specify a group name. This is how the list of sites looks for the Spatie team, who grouped so...| ohdear.app
If we look at the number of sites that our users monitor, we can split our user base into two large groups. Teams in the first group only monitor one or a couple of sites. The second group monitors 30 or more sites. We've just launched new features that make user management more flexible for large teams. In this blog post, we'd like to tell you all about it. Managing access for team members We assume that the teams with more than 30 sites consist of web agencies that monitor websites for thei...| ohdear.app
You can now mark status pages as private, guarding them from the outside world unless you have the secret passphrase. Public status pages We've had public status pages for quite a while. Many big brand names are also using them, like Laravel, VuetifyJS, Sex.com, ... and so many others. They're a convenient way of communicating to your clients in times of crisis. And, as you can tell from the examples, they're suitable for - well, every industry. 😉 But sometimes, you want things a little mo...| ohdear.app