Blog
Product updates, new features, technical deep dives, and behind-the-scenes stories from the Oh Dear team. You can also subscribe via our RSS feed.
Using Oh Dear to monitor your API responses
Oh Dear can now better tell whether your API is actually up. On top of checking the status code, it inspects the JSON your API returns and makes sure the right values are in there. A 200 only means the server answered, not that the answer was any good. Your API can return a 200 with an empty list or…
The ghost domain problem in DNS, and what we're doing about it
There's a DNS edge case that even people who know DNS well tend not to have run into: a domain pulled by its registry can keep appearing healthy to uptime checkers for days after it's gone. The .de zone triggers it when contact verification fails, and other registries have their own versions. We…
Improvements to our status pages as we tackle a DDoS
The uptime & availability of our status pages hasn't been great these past few days. The root cause is a persistent and pretty aggressive DDoS attack targeted at our own status page, status.ohdear.app. As a result, the overload on our systems also affected all other status pages we host for…
Connect any AI assistant to your Oh Dear data
Oh Dear keeps a watchful eye on your websites: uptime, performance, SSL certificates, broken links, DNS, cron jobs. If something can quietly break, we're already checking it for you. Today we're connecting that data to a new place: your AI assistant. We just shipped an MCP integration. If you use…
Enhancing our API for better agentic consumption
AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex are becoming a real part of developer workflows. They don't just write code, they call APIs, interpret responses, and take action based on what they find. That means the quality of your API responses directly affects how useful an agent can be. We've…
An Oh Dear skill for use in Claude Code or Codex
AI coding agents are getting good at calling tools. Claude Code, Codex, and others can run shell commands, parse JSON, and reason about the results. But they need to know what tools are available and how to use them. That's what skills are for. A skill is a small package of documentation that…
Dark mode is now available for the Oh Dear dashboard
Oh Dear's dashboard now supports dark mode. You can choose between light, dark, or system-based theming, and your preference is saved to your profile so it follows you everywhere. Three ways to theme your dashboard # We've added three theme options to your profile settings: Light: The classic Oh…
Oh Dear is now mobile-friendly
Oh Dear has always been a desktop-first tool. If you checked your monitors on your phone, you'd get the full desktop layout squeezed into a tiny screen, with lots of horizontal scrolling and tiny tap targets. That's fixed now. Every page in the app works on mobile. What changed # We didn't just slap…
DNS blocklist monitoring now available to all Oh Dear users
Your domain is on a spam blocklist. Password reset emails aren't arriving, order confirmations land in spam, and customers are complaining that "your site doesn't work." By the time you hear about it, the damage has been building for days. We've shipped DNS blocklist monitoring to catch…
Kickstarting our reseller program with Zone & Ploi Cloud
We've quietly been building a reseller program over the past months. The idea is simple: let hosting providers, deployment platforms, and agencies offer Oh Dear monitoring directly inside their own products. Not a stripped-down version, the full thing. We're working with several partners to bring Oh…
Making our docs AI-friendly: a tale of two caches
Our documentation, FAQ, and blog posts can now be served as clean markdown to AI agents. Send Accept: text/markdown or append .md to the URL, and you get structured content instead of a full HTML page. It worked great in development. Then we deployed, and two separate caching layers broke…
Our 3-part series on SQL performance optimisations
A few weeks ago, we massively improved the performance of the Oh Dear dashboard and website by optimising our SQL queries. We documented everything we learned along the way in a 3-part series - from finding problematic queries, to fixing them with indexes, to preventing regressions with automated…
SQL performance: automated detection & testing (part 3)
This is the final part of our 3-part series on SQL performance improvements. In part 1, we covered how to identify slow queries. In part 2, we explored how to fix them with indexes. In this post, we'll share how we prevent those performance issues from ever reaching production again. A few weeks…
The effects of the Cloudflare outage on Oh Dear
Last night, Cloudflare experienced one of their biggest outages in the past decade. Almost all websites behind Cloudflare's proxy/DDoS-protection service were offline for anywhere between 1–3 hours. That included our own website & application, while our status pages remained online the entire…
SQL performance: analysing & fixing slow queries (part 2)
This is part 2 of a 3-part series on SQL performance improvements. A few weeks ago, we massively improved the performance of the dashboard & website by optimizing some of our SQL queries. In this post, we'll dive deeper into the optimisations of queries with indexes. Table of contents: Ways to…
Request Mirror: a free HTTP request reflector
We have launched Request Mirror, a little free service to reflect HTTP requests. We've also open-sourced it: you can read the code in the ohdearapp/request-mirror.ohdear.app repo on GitHub. In this blog post I'd like to explain why we built it and how you can use it. Why we needed to reflect HTTP…
You can now connect your AI to Oh Dear
Today, we have launched our MCP server. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standardized way for AI models to connect with external data sources and tools. If you use a tool like Claude Code, then this is how you can connect Oh Dear to it (you can create an API token in your account settings) claude…
SQL performance: finding the queries to fix (part 1)
A few weeks ago, we massively improved the performance of the dashboard & website by optimizing some of our SQL queries. In this post, we'll share how we identified the queries that needed work. In the next post, we'll explore how we fixed each of them. This is part of our 3-part series on SQL…
Speed improvements to the dashboard, website & job processing
The past month we dedicated time and resources into optimising the speed and experience of our public website, our dashboard and our behind-the-scenes uptime checks that we perform. Overall, our website and dashboard feels about 2x to 3x faster. The biggest gains are for our users that have > 100…
Introducing ping and TCP port monitoring
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…
Exploring our new PHP SDK, built using Saloon
Today, next to Ping and TCP monitoring, we've also launched 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. In this blog post, I'd like to show you how you can use the new SDK and how it…
Here's how you can monitor your site's SEO performance
SEO is in a weird place right now. About one in five LinkedIn posts in my feed currently claims that SEO is dead, or has been assimilated by LLMs. Do not be remiss, dearest reader, because even an LLM still uses search engines like Google and Bing for web crawling. In other words, SEO still matters,…
Why we will be making breaking changes in our API soon
In a few weeks, on Tuesday 26st August, we will be deploying breaking changes to our API. In this blog post we want to share why and how we'll do this. If you're using our API, here are the upgrade instructions. Introducing Ping and TCP Port monitoring # A few weeks ago, we sent a survey out to all…
Monitor your Laravel app for vulnerabilities with Oh Dear
A few months ago, a critical RCE vulnerability landed in Livewire v3 (CVE-2025-54068). Stephen Rees-Carter walked through the impact on Securing Laravel: unauthenticated attackers could trigger remote code execution on apps that mounted a vulnerable component in a particular way. The patch shipped…
Here's how you can build site templates for Oh Dear
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…
We now support Google Chat
I'm pleased to share that we've can now notify you via Google Chat. Here's what that looks like: Our Google Chat notifications include: Visual status indicators with emojis (✅ for success, ⚠️ for warnings, ❌ for errors) Clear, concise messaging that tells you exactly what happened Quick…
Recipes for automating Oh Dear
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. github.com/ohdearapp/oh-dear-api-examples How it works Installation in under a minute just following…
How to create dynamic status pages on demand
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…
Oh Dear now lets you verify redirect URLs during uptime checks
We’ve just rolled out a helpful new setting to give you tighter control over how uptime is measured: Redirect URL Validation. Why URL validation matters By default, our uptime checks follow redirects and consider the site to be "up" as long as a 200 OK response is reached, regardless of…
Oh Dear becomes the choice for Dutch education & research
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…
