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 used to verify the problem. We'll only trigger an alert if both the primary and the secondary checks report the site as down.

This prevents any false alerts.

Uptime check options #

To check the uptime, we'll send a simple GET request to the site you provide. If it responds with a 2xx HTTP 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. This is sometimes called a "check string" or "HTML verification".
• http verb: instead of a GET request, you can specify that the check should be performed with a POST, PATCH or PUT HTTP method.
• payload: when not using a GET request to check your site, you can specify a payload. This payload will be sent along as the form parameters when checking your site.
• headers: you can specify up to 10 extra HTTP headers that should be used in the uptime check request.

Check frequency #

Uptime checks happen every minute from the primary location.

As soon as the primary location detects a problem, the secondary location will be used to verify it.

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

Time	Status	Monitored via
15:20h	OK	Primary location
15:21h	OK	Primary location
15:22h	PROBLEM	Primary location
15:22h	PROBLEM	+ Secondary location
15:23h	PROBLEM	Primary location
15:23h	PROBLEM	+ Secondary location
15:24h	PROBLEM	Primary location
15:24h	PROBLEM	+ Secondary location
15:24h		Notification fired: site DOWN
15:25h	PROBLEM	Primary location
15:25h	PROBLEM	+ Secondary location
15:26h	OK	Primary location
15:26h		Notification fired: site UP
15:27h	OK	Primary location
15:28h	OK	Primary location

The first problem is detected at 15:22h and the second location is immediately used to confirm the problem.

If both locations confirm the site is down for 2 minutes in a row, you will be notified of this event.

The check at 15:26h confirmed the site was back online, so you'll be notified of that too.

Note: you can overwrite the behaviour for 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/2xx response code on the check page, we consider it down. Note that we will follow HTTP/301 and HTTP/302 redirects. The final result of the redirect should be an HTTP/2xx.
2. If we receive a HTTP/2xx response, 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 marks the site as unavailable.

For example, an HTTP/204 No Content response will also be considered "online".

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 for you to replicate our exact check.

$ 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.