We reached out to one of our earliest customers, Marbles, to ask why they decided to move from Pingdom and use our service instead. If you're in doubt whether or not to give us a try, maybe they can convince you.

Our interview with Marbles

Hi Rias, who are you and what does your business do?

We are Marbles, an Antwerp based full service agency that does everything from creating identities to marketing & communications, business development and coaching. Of course creating websites and web applications is part of our services and to make sure they're the best they can be we use Oh Dear! for the monitoring.

Cool! Why did you chose Oh Dear! as your monitoring solution?

It includes all the checks we need for a very fair price.

Who did you have before?

We used Pingdom, but only for the basic uptime checks.

What made you switch?

The detection of mixed content & broken links and the https certificate expiration checks on top of the uptime monitoring.

How does Oh Dear! help you provide better service for your clients?

By alerting us of issues before anyone could possibly notice it manually. This allows us to fix issues before our clients are even aware of it, or if they are we can tell them we're already working on a fix.

What's your favorite feature of Oh Dear?

All the extra checks on top of basic uptime monitoring with Slack notifications and webhooks to receive reports.

Is there a killer feature we're missing that could help you?

Setting up notification "groups". We have clients who have an SLA with us, they need very quick solutions and we use the SMS notifications for them, for other clients we only set up the Slack Notifications.

It's bothersome to set up the SMS notifications individually for each site that needs them, and if another person needs to receive these, or the phone numbers need to get changed, we need to do this for each site manually.

In response: this is indeed a very good idea still missing, we're taking this up in our development to see if we can introduce an elegant solution to this problem. Thanks for letting us know!

What makes Oh Dear! special to you?

We'll be reaching out to more of our customers over the next months to find out why they chose us over the (many) competitors out there. We'd love to know what pursuaded them and what items we still need to address to serve our customers even better.

If you want to share your thoughts, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter at @OhDearApp.