Can I choose where Oh Dear checks my site from?
Yes. Oh Dear runs uptime checkers in multiple regions, and you can pick a primary region per monitor.
Available Oh Dear check regions
- Europe: Frankfurt, Paris, London
- North America: US east and US west
Your primary region is where most of the minute-by-minute uptime checks for that monitor originate.
How to change a monitor's check region
- Open the monitor.
- Go to Settings > Uptime check.
- Find Check location.
- Pick the region closest to your users (or closest to your origin server, depending on what you want to measure).
- Save.
New checks from that monitor run from the selected region starting on the next run. Existing history isn't retroactively re-assigned.
Which region should I pick?
- Pick the region closest to your users. That's where realistic network behaviour shows up (CDN routing, latency, regional outages).
- For geo-restricted sites, pick a region inside the allowed geography (or whitelist our IP ranges at your firewall).
- For internal tooling primarily accessed from the office, pick the region closest to that office.
How we verify downtime across regions
When your primary region reports a failure, we don't alert you yet. Oh Dear automatically re-checks from a different region before firing any notification. Concretely: if your primary is London and London reports a timeout, Paris (or another region) re-runs the exact same check. Both regions have to agree the site is unreachable before anything lands in your inbox.
You can see this on any incident report. The primary and secondary regions are listed side by side, so you can confirm a real outage (both regions red) against a single flaky region (primary red, secondary green - we wouldn't have alerted on that).
Monitoring from multiple regions simultaneously
The primary/secondary verification is automatic for every monitor. If you specifically need two independent monitors (one fixed to Europe, one fixed to US, for an SLA dashboard that has to show both), add the same URL as two separate monitors with different primary regions configured.
