Uptime reporting

Every site that gets added to Oh Dear will automatically have its uptime monitored.

Multi-location monitoring #

Each site is monitored from a primary location and verified from a secondary location. You can choose your primary location from within the Oh Dear dashboard.

If the primary location reports an error to Oh Dear, the secondary location is activated to verify that problem. Only if both the primary and the secondary checks report errors, we'll trigger an alert. This alleviates any false alerts.

Uptime check options #

To check uptime we'll send a simple GET request to your site you provide. If it responds with a 2XX response, the check passes. In the settings screen of the site there are several options available to customize this check:

• look for string: we can check if a given string is found on the result. If it is not found, we'll mark the check as failed.
• http verb: instead of a simple GET request you can specify that the check should be performed with a POST, PATCH or PUT request.
• payload: when not using a GET request to check your site, you can specify a payload. This payload will used a form parameters when checking your site
• headers: you can specify up to 5 extra headers that should be used in the uptime check request

Check frequency #

Uptime checks happen at least every 5 minutes from the primary location.

As soon as the primary location detects a problem, the secondary location will be used to verify it. From that point forward, all checks happen every minute as long as there is downtime, via both locations.

If you were to put this on a timescale, it would look like this.

Time	Status	Monitored via
15:20h	OK	Primary location
15:25h	OK	Primary location
15:30h	PROBLEM	Primary location
15:30h	PROBLEM	Secondary location
15:31h	PROBLEM	Primary location
15:31h	PROBLEM	Secondary location
15:32h	PROBLEM	Primary location
15:32h	PROBLEM	Secondary location
15:32h		Notification fired: site down
15:33h	PROBLEM	Primary location
15:33h	PROBLEM	Secondary location
15:34h	OK	Primary location
15:34h		Notification fired: OK
15:39h	OK	Primary location
15:44h	OK	Primary location

The first problem is detected at 15:30h and the secondary location is immediately used to confirm the problem. If both locations confirm the site is down for 3 minutes in a row, you will be notified of this event.

The check at 15:34h confirmed the site was back online, so you'll be notified of that too.

Note: you can overwrite the behaviour of when we alert you, by changing the website settings in your dashboard.

What is downtime? #

We classify downtime in 2 ways:

1. If we receive anything other than an HTTP/200 response code on the check page, we consider it down. Note that we will follow HTTP/301 and HTTP/302 redirects. The end result of the redirect should be an HTTP/200.
2. If we receive HTTP/200 but we didn't find the optional check string specified on the site settings screen, we consider it down.
3. If the site takes more than 5 seconds to load, we consider it down.

Any of those events will mark the site as unavailable.

Detailed reporting #

If the site took too long to load, we can only show you that it timed out.

Operation timed out after 5000 milliseconds with 0 bytes received

However, if the site responded with a status code other than HTTP/200, we will show you the exact HTTP response headers we received to help you troubleshoot, along with the IP(s) we used to monitor your site.

Downtime is verified from multiple locations, those locations and their IP addresses are confirmed in the notification:

Monitored from: Paris, France (45.32.146.84, 2001:19f0:6801:5f3:5400:1ff:fe38:3572)
Verified downtime via: Chicago, USA (104.207.138.202, 2001:19f0:5c01:7c0:5400:1ff:fe38:72f1)

All debug-headers are supplied for you, together with copy/paste cURL commands.

$ curl -i https://yoursite.tld
HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2017 16:05:11 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Connection: keep-alive
Set-Cookie: ...

With that information, you should have all the needed information to troubleshoot the problem.

Monthly reporting #

Each month, you'll receive an uptime report for all your sites to show you how well they performed.

In it, we show you what percentage of uptime each site received, as monitored via its primary location. If a site is down, it'll be subtracted from the total uptime.

Here's what that might look like.

Site	Uptime
ohdear.app	100%
ourcompetitor.io	99.95%
hackerne.ws	100%

Want to know what happened during that month? Click through each site and navigate to the uptime page in the Oh Dear dashboard to see the timings of each downtime.