5 Tips for Managing Client Sites With Oh Dear

Managing dozens (or hundreds) of client sites can quickly become chaotic without the right tools. Whether you're running an agency, internal platform team or dev shop, visibility and control are everything. That's where Oh Dear comes in.

Oh Dear is an all-in-one monitoring service that gives you a unified dashboard for uptime checks, performance monitoring, broken link detection, SSL and domain expiry alerts, scheduled task validation and more. But beyond just running checks Oh Dear also gives you powerful tools for organizing and automating how you manage your client sites at scale.

Here are 5 practical ways to make that happen.

1. Use Tags to Organize and Notify

When you're managing a fleet of sites, grouping them by client, environment, region or team is essential. Oh Dear lets you apply tags in any format but we suggest something like:

• client:spatie
• env:production
• infra:cloudflare
• region:eu-west-1
• project:rebrand

You are probably already aware that you can route notifications to tags or groups of tags. Once your tags are set up, you can configure tag group notifications. This means when something goes wrong on any site tagged with env:production + client:* for example, you can notify a VIP Slack channel or OpsGenie team automatically - no manual routing needed while env:staging + internal can go to the email inbox that no one reads.

Tags also make onboarding easy. New production application for a client? Just tag it accordingly client:spatie and all the right checks and notifications apply.

2. Find Sites by Tag via Global Search

Tags aren't just for routing notifications - they’re fully searchable. Open the global search menu in Oh Dear and type any tag (like region:eu-west-1 or team:seo) to instantly filter your sites.

This is especially handy for large accounts where you need to quickly check in on just the production sites in Europe or just the ones belonging to a specific customer.

3. Trigger Health Checks on Deployment via the API

Oh Dear provides an API endpoint to trigger checks manually, which is perfect for CI/CD workflows.

This ensures you catch issues before the client does, and keeps your deployment pipeline tightly integrated with live monitoring. Here's an article explaining how you can run a new broken links check on-demand: https://ohdear.app/news-and-updates/trigger-an-on-demand-uptime-broken-links-check-after-a-deploy

But you can also apply the same principles to all of our other checks. My favourites are:

• Lighthouse
• Sitemap

const OHDEAR_TOKEN = 'your API token';

// you can find this via the /sites/{id} endpoint
// or from the check settings in the app
const checkId = 1; 

fetch('https://ohdear.app/api/checks/1/request-run', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Authorization': `Bearer ${OHDEAR_TOKEN}`,
    'Accept': 'application/json',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  }
})
  .then(res => {
    if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`HTTP ${res.status}: ${res.statusText}`);
    return res.json();
  })
  .then(data => console.log('Check run requested:', data))
  .catch(err => console.error('Error triggering check:', err));

Our uptime checks and application health checks run every minute - so that's two extra things we don't have to worry about.

You could also add a maintenance window if you don't have zero-downtime deployments or you are expecting some temporary latency after go-live. Read more here: https://ohdear.app/docs/features/how-to-configure-maintenance-windows

4. Automate Site Creation Using Templates

When spinning up new client sites speed and consistency is key. Rather than configuring everything from scratch, you can:

• Assign one of your sites as a template site using tag: template with your base checks, tags and settings.
• Use the API to clone that site when onboarding a new client.
• We support all site settings from our API so you can customize the new site as needed (e.g. domain name, team assignments) at the same time.
• Add the site to an internal status page and client-facing status page both with custom domains. (Yes you can have as many status pages, custom domains and sites as you need. Included in every plan!)

This approach saves time, ensures consistency across all clients and reduces configuration drift.

5. Control Access with Fine-Grained Permissions

Not every stakeholder needs to see everything. Oh Dear lets you invite clients or teammates with scoped access:

• Give dev teams access to performance and scheduled task checks.
• Let clients see uptime and SSL status only.
• Prevent accidental edits to monitoring settings.

This keeps your workspace clean and secure while still being transparent with stakeholders.

You can also add clients to the monthly site reports so they will automatically be up to date. We run reports on the first day of every month.

Tip: client email address can be added to the monthly site report via sites API.

Bonus: Add Site Status Badges

Want to show the latest status on your client sites? Oh Dear provides a site badge you can embed showing current uptime status.

// https://ohdear.app/api/sites/{id}

{
   ...
   "badge_id": "01jeb77smcek1f4dxys08vect5",
   ...
}

Then update your content with:

<img src="https://ohdear.app/badges/site/{badge_id}/uptime/normal" alt="uptime status badge" />

It's a small touch that builds trust with clients and surfaces real-time updates to visitors.

What's Next?

In the next few blog posts, we'll dive deeper into each of these tips with hands-on code examples using the Oh Dear API, tips for setting up automation and ideas for streamlining your agency workflows even further.

Stay tuned!