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.
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…
Typehinting Laravel validation rules using PHPStan's type aliases
Static analysis is a powerful tool that examines your code without actually running it, catching bugs and type mismatches before they reach production. For PHP developers, PHPStan has become the go-to solution, and Laravel developers often use Larastan - a wrapper that adds Laravel-specific…
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…
Introducing our improved uptime check
The past few months, we’ve working on improving our uptime check. We proud to announce that this improved check is now available for all users. You don’t have to do anything to get it (unless you are not subscribed to Oh Dear, in that case your should subscribe to Oh Dear 😄), all our users…
Managing monthly reports with the API
On the first of every month we generate an extensive PDF report for every site. This report contains a summary of all check results for the month and is a snapshot available to you and your team via email and the Oh Dear dashboard. We keep the report history so each month can be viewed in a browser…
Here are 10 ways to prevent website downtime
Every minute of website downtime cost large organizations an average of $9,000. That’s half a million dollars every hour, damn. And that’s just the average. If your organization heavily relies on your website to do business, that cost can increase even further. Needless to say, preventing…
You can now log in using passkeys
We’ve added a new option to log in to Oh Dear: passkeys! When logging in using a passkey, you don’t have to type an email or password, and you won’t be redirect to a third party for logging in. It’s also super fast. How to use passkeys at Oh Dear # Here’s me logging in to Oh Dear using a…
How does website monitoring even work?
Every website manager knows that feeling when you look at your inbox only to find a customer notifying you that a core page of your site is down. The worst part of it all, you don’t know how long that page has been down for. If you’ve yet to experience that, count your blessings. Well, unless…
Lifespan of TLS certificates is getting reduced to 47 days
In a pretty significant shift for internet security and subsequently certificate management, the CA/Browser Forum has officially voted to reduce the maximum validity period of TLS certificates to just 47 days by March 15, 2029. This move aims to enhance digital security and trust across the web. But…
Running our test suite in parallel on GitHub actions
A couple of years ago, Laravel introduced a great feature which allows to run PHPUnit / Pest tests in parallel. This results in a big boost in performance. First we had to do the groundwork: getting our Laravel suite ready for parallel testing. By default, it determines the concurrency level by…
Broken links troubleshooting and a couple of extras
We are excited to announce a powerful new feature in our Broken Links monitor: Troubleshooting. When we can’t crawl all your links, or you see unexpected gaps in the results, it can be tricky to know where to start. Our new Troubleshooting tab is here to help. Quickly identify and resolve crawling…
Why your business can’t afford to skip website monitoring
Why would I monitor my website in the first place? # Your website is your business’ storefront, sales team, customer service department, and potentially even your primary revenue channel. Just like you’d protect the physical presence of these aspects of your business with a security system, you…
Here's what worked and what didn't when marketing SaaS like Oh Dear
Where we're at in the scene # Oh Dear is the underdog in the website monitoring software space. We’re small fries in a market dominated by big, well-funded competitors. Yet somehow, Freek and Mattias managed to build a solid user base and created a profitable SaaS business. But where do you go…
Detecting and Resolving Broken Links Using Website Monitoring Software
Broken links are more than minor annoyances—they can significantly harm your website’s user experience, SEO rankings, and overall credibility. Whether managing a small blog or a complex e-commerce platform, ensuring that your site functions flawlessly is essential to keeping visitors engaged and…
Enhanced Broken Links Monitoring: Images, CSS and JS
We are excited to announce an enhancement to one of our most unique features at Oh Dear: Broken Links! Broken links monitoring crawls your entire website for internal and external links but we now take this a step further by expanding our monitoring to include CSS, JavaScript, and image links.…
In & outside business hour notifications
Developers, marketing teams and business owners rely on Oh Dear to monitor their entire website and applications. We offer a feature-packed, all-in-one service with simple pricing - designed specifically for your peace of mind. Oh Dear already has a flexible and powerful notification system and to…
New feature: Status Page Update Templates
We know how crucial it is to provide clear and timely communication during incidents or downtime. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Status Page Update Templates - a new feature that makes it even easier to keep your users informed while maintaining a consistent message. Why use a status page…
Incident Template Library
We recently announced a new feature to enhance how you communicate with your users during maintenance, incidents, and general service updates. Status Page Templates allows you to save and re-use status updates - but how do you know what incidents might happen or what updates you need to keep users…
Cutting PHP CPU usage 40% with an Ubuntu 22.04 upgrade
Over these past few weeks, we've updated our Ubuntu 20.04 LTS uptime servers to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The reason was mostly just staying up-to-date, but we had a surprising side-effect that was unexpected but very welcome. Measuring reduced CPU usage # An easy riddle: can you guess when we were running…
How to upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
We're in the process of upgrading some of our older uptime satellite servers that power our Uptime Monitoring from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. This is mostly a smooth process, but in case anyone's ever in a similar position, these are the steps we're taking to complete the upgrades. We should…
Making sure Laravel's debug mode is always disabled in production
Recently, people started talking about a malware called “Androxgh0st” specifically targeting Laravel apps. In a recent edition of Securing Laravel, Stephen Rees-Carter wrote a good explanation of how it works. The malware targets apps with APP_DEBUG set to true. When enabled, Laravel will give…
Laravel Pulse cards for response times, jobs & links
Today, we released the ohdearapp/ohdear-pulse package, which contains Laravel Pulse cards to show you the status of your scheduled jobs, any broken links you have in your Laravel app, and uptime / HTTP performance stats. All of these cards use the Oh Dear API to fetch their data. Laravel Pulse is a…
Our DNS check can now monitor hidden CNAME records
Besides monitoring your site's uptime, Oh Dear offers many other checks to monitor all kinds of aspects of your web app. One of those checks is our DNS check. Whenever we detect problems with your DNS records or when one of the DNS records changes, we can notify you. By default, we only monitor the…
Make money by referring customers through our new affiliate program
We're proud to announce that we started our affiliate program. Using this program, you can generate a link (like https://ohdear.app?via=your-name) that you can include in your blog posts, tweets, or anywhere on the web. If somebody clicks that link and subscribes to Oh Dear in the next 30 days,…
Better handling of bounced emails
Whenever we detects something wrong with your site it can send you a notification. We have multiple channels available: Slack, Telegram, webhooks, and many more. The most popular channel our users use is just a simple mail. Behind the scenes, Oh Dear uses Postmark to send out mails. Postmark will…
Our redesigned status pages can now show uptime history
Next to the many checks we can perform, we can also render beautiful status pages to inform your audience about the health of your service. Today, we've deployed a redesign of these status pages. In this iteration, everything is more polished. We picked a new font and colors and added some icons to…
Our Opsgenie integration is now available
When we detect a problem with your site we can notify you via mail, a slack message, a webhook, or any of our other notifications channels. For most of our users this is enough, but those work in larger teams often need more flexibility. Today, we are launching our Opsgenie integration, a modern…
Changing the owner of the team can now be done in our UI
Changing the owner of the team can now be done in our UI In the past, we've seen users reach out to support to change the owner of a time for a variety of reasons. You can now change the owner of the team without contacting support. Just head over to the team settings and scroll down. As the owner…
Behind The Scenes Of Oh Dear
In this sponsored talk given at Laracon India 2023, I demo all major Oh Dear features. After that, I share how the Laravel app behind Oh Dear is structured using domains. The audio quality is not perfect, but it should still be understandable.
Our API tokens can now be scoped by site or status page
Oh Dear has an extensive API that powers various powerful integrations. To use the API, you first need to create an API Token in the Oh Dear UI. Previously, such a token could be used to make API calls to any site or status page in your Oh Dear account. We noticed that some of our users are agencies…
