Can I choose where Oh Dear checks my site from?
Yes. Oh Dear runs uptime checkers in many locations, and you can pick a primary location per monitor.
Available Oh Dear check locations #
You can choose from cities across six continents:
- Europe: Frankfurt, Paris, London, Stockholm
- North America: New York, Dallas, Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles
- Asia: Bangalore, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore
- Australia: Sydney
- South America: Sao Paulo
- Africa: Cape Town
We add locations over time, so the Check location dropdown on the monitor is always the definitive list. Your primary location is where most of the minute-by-minute uptime checks for that monitor originate.
How to change a monitor's check location #
- Open the monitor.
- Go to Settings > Uptime check.
- Find Check location.
- Pick the location 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 location starting on the next run. Existing history isn't retroactively re-assigned.
Which location should I pick? #
- Pick the location closest to your users. That's where realistic network behaviour shows up (CDN routing, latency, regional outages).
- For geo-restricted sites, pick a location inside the allowed geography (or whitelist our IP ranges at your firewall).
- For internal tooling primarily accessed from one office, pick the location closest to that office.
How we verify downtime across locations #
When your primary location reports a failure, we don't alert you yet. Oh Dear automatically re-checks from a different location before firing any notification. Concretely: if your primary is London and London reports a timeout, another location re-runs the exact same check. Both 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 locations are listed side by side, so you can confirm a real outage (both red) against a single flaky location (primary red, secondary green - we wouldn't have alerted on that).
Monitoring from multiple locations simultaneously #
The primary/secondary verification is automatic for every monitor. If you specifically need two independent monitors (one fixed to Europe, one fixed to the US, for an SLA dashboard that has to show both), add the same URL as two separate monitors with different primary locations configured.
