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.
Making sure routes and config files are cached in a Laravel app
In a typical Laravel application, you'll likely to have many routes, config files and possible some events. In your development environment these routes and config files will loaded and registered in each request. The performance penalty for this is not too big. In a production environment, you want…
Building Oh Dear’s new design: Creating a color system, why and how
In the previous blog post I talked about how we are implementing the Oh Dear redesign. In this post I go into more detail on why and how we implemented a tailwind-like color system which supports all the colours used throughout the redesign. From Sketch to code # One of the tasks that needs to be…
Status pages can now be viewed as JSON or XML
Next to a large collection of checks, Oh Dear offers the ability to easily create beautiful status pages. This way, you can communicate the status of your sites and services to your users. Take a look at the Oh Dear powered status pages for Flare and Laravel. Today, we added the ability to view the…
Introducing Nick and Sean to the Oh Dear team
We're growing the team at Oh Dear with two very strong additions: Nick and Sean. Ever since we started Oh Dear (almost 5 years ago 😱) we've been adding new features, scaling out our infrastructure and growing our user base. That growth has lead us to two important realisations: Slowly but surely,…
You can now monitor your DNS records using Oh Dear
We can now notify you of changing DNS records and let you know when we've detected a problem with your domain nameservers. Woohoo! 🥳 What is DNS record monitoring? # Behind just about every website is a translation service that converts what we humans can read (the "domain name") to…
You can now customise how we handle redirects
A good deal of sites redirect visitors to a specific more relevant page. Think, for instance, of a site that redirects you from / to a page in a relevant language, for instance /en or /nl. A single redirect is often not a problem, but having multiple redirects in a chain can hinder your site's user…
Introducing our new interactive Telegram notifications
When something is wrong with your site, we can already notify you via a lot of different channels: mail, Slack, SMS, Webhooks, ... Today, we're adding support for Telegram notifications. We've polished the entire connection flow and made the notifications themselves interactive. To get started,…
Let's Encrypt DST Root CA X3 certificate set to expire
If you've been using Let's Encrypt for a while, you may have noticed that their certificates are signed by a root certificate titled DST Root CA X3. That root certificate is set to expire in a few hours. Any certificates still signed by that root will no longer be valid. But luckily, that shouldn't…
We've increased our performance by decreasing the number of queries
Under the hood, Oh Dear is a large Laravel application that performs many queries all of the time. To power future features, we've recently changed our database structure and refactored some pieces in our code base. We increased performance by decreasing the number of queries. As an Oh Dear user,…
Monitoring password protected sites using Oh Dear
Keeping an eye on your site and sending you a notification when it goes down is one of the core features of Oh Dear. Under the hood, we'll send a request to your site and take a look if the response code is in the 200-299 range, which is the default response code range to indicate that everything is…
We now support Pushover's priority messages
When we detect something wrong with your site (it is down, a broken link is detected, the certificate is invalid, ...), we can notify you via one of the many notification channels we support. One of those channels is Pushover, an excellent service to send native notifications to mobile devices. We…
Introducing advanced user management for large teams
If we look at the number of sites that our users monitor, we can split our user base into two large groups. Teams in the first group only monitor one or a couple of sites. The second group monitors 30 or more sites. We've just launched new features that make user management more flexible for large…
Introducing monthly site reports
Today, we're introducing a new major feature: monthly site reports. In such a report, you get a bird's eye summary of everything we know of a site in a particular month. We've gone the extra mile and added the ability to mail these reports to people outside of your team automatically. If you're an…
Making our Laravel test suite ready for parallel testing
To make sure that our service is working correctly, we have a suite of automated tests. The test suite is executed when we make changes and deploy something to production. Using the new parallel testing feature that recently landed in Laravel, we managed to run our testsuite about four times faster.…
How we added a favicons to our site list
Today we've added favicons to the site list you see when you log in to Oh Dear. Using the favicon, you quickly recognize a particular site. It also just looks nice visually. In this blog post, we'd like to share how we achieved this. Watch it being code up # In this stream, I live coded the favicon…
Our Black Friday special: free until we prove our worth
As an uptime monitoring service, we usually see 2 kinds of customers. For the first type, we're an easy sell, but the other needs a lot of convincing. ✅ "My site went down, I need monitoring!" ❌ "Why do I need monitoring if my site never goes down?" So our Black Friday…
Scheduled task monitoring now available to all our users
After an intense testing period, we're excited to announce our scheduled task monitoring is now available to all our users! Why monitor scheduled tasks? # Automation is at the heart of just about every company these days. We trust our automation to do the work for us. We trust that it will continue…
How to monitor websites behind HTTP basic authentication
Oh Dear allows you to monitor any kind of website, even those behind HTTP basic authentication. In this guide, we'll cover the steps on how to monitor a website behind an HTTP basic authentication prompt. What is HTTP basic authentication? # A quick recap: HTTP basic authentication, also known as…
Deep integration with WordPress and Oh Dear
There is now a WordPress plugin that gives you deeper insights into broken links found, the performance of your site and the uptime statistics! A WordPress plugin for Oh Dear # Our friends at KryptoniteWP have developed a free WordPress plugin that seamlessly integrates with your Oh Dear account…
Introducing new performance monitoring for your websites
We're excited to announce all Oh Dear users now have access to detailed performance metrics for all of their websites! Let us take you through a quick tour of the new performance monitoring. An updated dashboard # All our users will see a new dashboard upon login. We'll show you a performance graph…
Resolving the AddTrust External CA Root certificate expiration
Some of our users have received reports about their AddTrust External CA Root or USERTrust RSA Certification Authority certificate. The problem occurs because the remote server sends a root certificate in the chain that will expire in less than 14 days. Here are the steps to verify this and a few…
How Oh Dear identified a certificate problem at a large CDN provider
As part of our service, we perform SSL certificate monitoring. We do this slightly different than other providers, which is why were able to detect a problem with the SSL certificates of a large, commercial, CDN provider. In this post, we'll do a technical deep-dive into how we found this problem!…
Snoozing alerts and advanced Slack notifications
We've introduced two very cool new features to Oh Dear: the ability to temporarily silence alerts and advanced Slack notifications. Snoozing alerts # You can now temporarily silence alerts being sent by Oh Dear. These snoozes can be activated per check we perform. Say you receive a notification your…
Seeing detailed logs for webhook events
We've added the ability to see detailed webhook logs to Oh Dear, showing both the sent request and the received response for all notifications we have sent. Debugging webhooks can be a pain # We've been there and it isn't fun. You either add logging logic in your own webhook to capture the payload…
Configure custom SSL certificate expiration thresholds
When we first launched Oh Dear, we had a fixed certificate expiration timer: 14 days. As soon as the expiration date came within 14 days, we'd start sending a daily reminder to hurry up and renew those certificates. Our first exception was made when Let's Encrypt gained more in popularity. We…
Finding clients hit by Let's Encrypt mass-revocation
Yesterday, we sent out notifications to all clients whose certificates we continuously monitor and that are affected by the Let's Encrypt mass revocation of SSL certificates. In this post, we'll share the details how we found those certificates. Now, the morning after, we're well rested and in good…
A fresh new look for Oh Dear
We're super proud to show the new us - we have a brand new logo, an entirely new style and a new website. In this post, we'll show you all the changes! A rename of Oh Dear # As part of our change, we're making a tiny change to our name: we are no longer "Oh Dear!" but are now "Oh…
Adding maintenance windows to Oh Dear
We've just released a new feature: maintenance windows! You can now place your site in maintenance which will mute all notifications during that period. Setting maintenance windows # You can add a maintenance period per website. You set the start and end date, and during that timeframe the…
Chrome's security push makes mixed-content checks vital
The team at Chrome has announced their plans for handling mixed content last week on their blog. We'll highlight the most important details and what the potential impact is. A security-first approach: what is mixed content? # As a general reminder: "mixed content" exists when you have a…
Serving status pages with Caddy & Laravel subdomains
We recently launched our new Status Page feature. Under the hood, it's using the Caddy proxy server and Laravel's subdomain routing to serve the right status page on the right domain. With this technology stack, we can automatically generate, configure & renew the SSL certificates for custom…
