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.
Trigger an on demand uptime & broken links check after a deploy
You can use our API to trigger an on demand run of both the uptime check and the broken links checker. If you add this to, say, your deploy script, you can have near-instant validation that your deploy succeeded and didn't break any links & pages. Find your check IDs # Our API allows you to…
Extending uptime monitoring with POST, PUT & PATCH methods
Next to our standard uptime monitoring through GET requests, we've added support for POST, PUT & PATCH methods too. This builds on our improved uptime check. More uptime monitoring capabilities # We've had the option to monitor websites via a GET request since the very launch. It allows us to…
We're a featured .app domain on Google's Registry
We're proud to have been listed on Google's 1 year anniversary post about the launch of the .APP top level domain. A year of .APP # A year ago, on May 8th 2018, Google launched a new top level domain (TLD) called .app. At that time, Oh Dear! had just launched on the ohdearapp.com domain. It was a…
Using Oh Dear! to keep your Varnish cache warm
Slow websites are annoying, right? We sure think so. One common solution is to introduce a caching proxy like Varnish to help cache pages and reduce your server load. The good news is, if you have Oh Dear!, you can let those 2 work together. Varnish + Oh Dear! crawling = ❤️ # The idea is as…
Adding a Friendly Name to your sites
We've added the ability to show a "friendly name" for your sites, instead of the domain and the URL associated with it. For each website, you can configure the display name that we should use to present the website. This will be the name used throughout Oh Dear! in place likes our Slack or…
Introducing our public tools section: try Oh Dear! without an account
We launched a cool new feature that everyone can enjoy: public versions of all the checks available within Oh Dear! Now you can try Oh Dear! without even creating an account. The philosophy behind our public checks # Why give something away for free if others are paying for it? We love creating…
Why agency Marbles chose Oh Dear for uptime monitoring
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…
Our Gitlab CI pipeline for Laravel applications
We've been fairly public about the amount of testing we have for Oh Dear!. Freek has been showing bits and pieces on his Twitter to show the extent of that effort. Having a huge test suite is nice, but integrating it into your development workflow is even better. That's why we're releasing our…
Transitioning from laravel-echo-server to laravel-websockets
We have just finished our transition from a websocket server based on laravel-echo-server to one that is fully driven by PHP: laravel-websockets. In this post, we'll highlight why and how we made that move. Simplifying our stack # As we're built on Laravel, we already run a fair bit of nodejs during…
Redesigning parts of our homepage
We've launched a fresh now look for the Oh Dear! homepage and a lot of tweaks to the overall look & feel of the public facing pages of our site. Allow us to show those changes in more detail! A fresh, clean homepage # This is visually the most noticeable change we've pushed. When we first…
Automatic monitoring of Laravel Forge managed sites
We've launched a cool feature for our users on the Laravel Forge platform: automatic monitoring of any of your sites and servers managed through Laravel Forge! How the automatic monitoring works # Forge recently introduced a feature called tags, which allows you to add custom tags to any server or…
How to size & scale your Laravel Queues
Laravel offers a convenient way to create asynchronous background tasks using its queues. We utilize those heavily at Oh Dear! for all our monitoring jobs and in this post we'll share some of our lessons learned and what we consider to be best practices. Getting started with queues # The most basic…
