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.
New Broken links UI
Keeping your website free of broken links is essential for good user experience and SEO - that's why Oh Dear monitors your entire website! Our broken links crawler will find and test all the links on your site and we keep going until we have checked everything! In addition to alerting you when you…
Tag notifications
At Oh Dear, we’re always looking for ways to make web monitoring easier and more efficient for our users. That’s why we’re excited to introduce Tag Notifications, a new feature that expands our notification options beyond site and team-level notifications. Why? # For our larger customers using…
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…
Update to Microsoft Teams Notifications
Oh Dear offers several ways to keep you updated on important events like downtime, performance and DNS changes, broken links, Lighthouse issues, and more. By default, you will get email notifications to the email address you used to sign up. But you can also choose to receive alerts to your…
History Filters
We know that keeping track of downtime and other failures across multiple sites can be a challenge, especially for larger teams. That’s why we’ve added filters to the 'History' page and introduced 'Team History' to make monitoring easier and more efficient! What’s New? # Site History Filters…
Sitemap monitoring is now available at Oh Dear
Oh Dear can perform many checks: uptime, broken links, scheduled jobs, DNS, and much more. We proud to announce that we’ve added a new check: sitemap monitoring. This check will make sure that the structure of your sitemap is correct. We’ll also check if each and every link it links to a page…
Improving our broken link tests
One of the most unique features Oh Dear offers is the broken links and mixed content crawler. We will crawl your site for all links, reporting any broken pages to your defined notification channels. Recently, we encountered degraded performance with our crawler service due to a breaking change in an…
You can now manage notification preferences via our API
Our service can detect various problems with your website: whenever it is down, or a broken link is detected, your cron job isn't running on time, and much much more. Whenever we see a problem we can notify you via email, Slack, webhooks, and various other channels. Up until now, you could configure…
Enforcing Multi-Factor Authentication
We are pleased to announce the introduction of team-level Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). With our latest update, owners now have the ability to enforce MFA for all team members. This means you can ensure that every user accessing your account is taking the necessary steps to protect sensitive…
Improving our Multi-Factor Authentication
This week we introduced two new updates to enhance the user/team security administration. These updates focus on improving the Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) setup and visibility for team management. Let’s take a look. 1. View Your MFA Secret Key Previously, users could set up MFA by scanning a…
Every second counts in our UI
Downtime has always been shown in minutes, hours, and days but for shorter downtimes you would see "0m" even if the actual downtime was less than a minute. We've updated the UI to show downtime in seconds. This means no more manually calculating brief outages — you’ll see exactly how…
Reducing PHP's CPU usage by nearly 40% by upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04
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…
Introducing our beautiful status badges
For each site and status page in your account, we now offer badges that you can use to show the status of your site or service everywhere you want. Technically these badges are svg's, so they are very lightweight to embed. The default badge # The default badge shows the name of a site and its uptime…
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 to show response times, scheduled jobs, broken 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…
Two smallish improvements to our DNS check
As you probably know, Oh Dear is run by a small but capable team. One of the advantages of being small is that we can implement stuff pretty quickly: there’s no red tape, and our code base is very healthy. So, when our users have feature requests that make sense to add to Oh Dear, we can move…
Our Lighthouse check has been upgraded to Lighthouse v11
We are happy to announce that we have upgraded our Lighthouse check from v9 to the latest version, Lighthouse v11. Lighthouse is an open-source tool by Google that helps developers improve the quality of their web pages. Oh Dear can run this check frequently for your site, informing you when…
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…
Our uptime check can now verify the absence of a string
The most popular check that Oh Dear offers is, without a doubt, our uptime check. It's enabled for almost every site we monitor. By default, this check will notify you when your site returns a non-2xx response, but you can greatly customize that behavior. You can check if the response has certain…
Our API now allows you to read all notification settings
Oh Dear's robust API provides endpoints that enable programmatically accessing nearly all features available on the web UI. One thing that needed to be added was the ability to read all notification settings in your account. A few of our users requested this; it made sense to add this, so we did…
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…
You can now log in faster using Google and GitHub
Since Oh Dear was launched, we offered a traditional login using the familiar email and password combination. Today, we've launched our social login. This feature allows you to use your Google or GitHub account to log into Oh Dear. You'll see these two new buttons on the registration and login page.…
Our uptime check can now verify response headers
When we make a request to your site to verify that your site is up, the response of your server will contain certain headers. We can verify that those headers contain the values you expect. If these expectations are not met, we'll consider your site as down. In the "Responses" section of…
We can now notify you through PagerDuty
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. This is enough for most of our users, but those who work in larger teams often need more flexibility. Today, we are launching our PagerDuty integration.…
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 broken links check has been improved
One of our unique monitoring features is that we crawl your entire site to discover links that might be broken. When we discover a broken link, we'll send you a notification and display every broken link in our Broken Links Report. We've made a nice quality-of-life improvement to that Broken Links…
You can now add notes to downtime periods
Oh Dear offers many checks to ensure your website is healthy. The most popular check that is active for almost every site we monitor is the uptime check. When the uptime check detects that your site is down, it will notify you via one of our many available channels. The check will also create a…
