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.
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…
Our broken links check now highlights application errors
One of the unique features of Oh Dear is that we crawl your entire site and report any broken links. Our broken links report had two main categories: external broken links: these are links on your site that point towards a page on another site internal broken links: these are links on your site that…
You can now save notes on a site
We implemented a small, but valuable feature requested by some of our users. You can now store some free form notes on a site. When heading over a site's settings, you'll see the new "notes" field. Here you can add some important information to the site, for example, some details on the…
Redesigning Oh Dear: a case study
A few months ago, we totally redesigned our service. We didn't to this on our own, but got help from our friends at Digital With You. On their site, they published an in-depth case study on how they rewrote marketing copy, chose new colours and redesigned entire pages. Check it out:…
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.
You can now add tags to your sites
Some of our users have a lot of sites in their Oh Dear account. A feature often requested is the ability to add a little bit of meta information about each site. To do that, we've introduced the ability to add tags to a site. Tags can be used for instance how important it is to fix a problem with…
Status pages can now be displayed in multiple languages
In addition to performing various checks to monitor your site, Oh Dear also offers beautiful status pages. Status pages can now use multiple languages. Using these status pages, you can inform your audience about the status of your service. Here's the beautiful Oh Dear powered status page of the…
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…
Lighthouse SEO monitoring is now available at Oh Dear
We're proud to announce we have added a new check to our service: Lighthouse SEO. Using this check you can detect (and get solution suggestions) for SEO and performance problems. What is Lighthouse # Lighthouse is a tool provided by Google for improving the quality of web pages. It has audits for…
We have redesigned our entire service
As of today, Oh Dear is in a brand new jacket. We've totally redesigned Oh Dear's UI. Our app doesn't only look better, but we've also made it much easier to use. We feel that our new design should speak for itself, so we highly recommend visiting the home page, browsing a bit around, register an…
A preview of our upcoming redesign
Earlier this year, we announced that one of our goals for this year is to bring the UI of Oh Dear to the next level. Behind the scenes, our team is working hard on a complete rewrite of our marketing website and app. We're currently targeting the end of September timeframe to launch our redesign. In…
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…
You can now monitor your domain name using Oh Dear
When registering a domain name, you could assume it is yours forever. Unfortunately, this is false, and most domains must be renewed periodically. If you fail to do this, you risk losing your domain, and ownership could be transferred away from you. Oh Dear's new Domain check can send you a…
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…
Easily navigate Oh Dear using the command palette
When you log in Oh Dear, you'll notice a new little search field in the header. When you click that, it opens up a nice command palette. You can use this to navigate to anywhere in our service quickly. If you want to go to the performance graph of your site, just type "performance", ...…
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…
Building Oh Dear’s new design: Implementing the design
In the previous blog post I gave an introduction about the project setup for the redesign of the new Oh Dear frontend. In this blog post I would like to show you how we are implementing the redesign of the Oh Dear frontend. Feel free to provide feedback on the design choices and statements made in…
Status page subscriptions are now available
Using Oh Dear you can create beautiful status pages. As from today, you can let your users also subscribe to updates on those status pages. In this blog post we'll tell you all about it. Subscribing to status pages updates # In addition to monitoring your site, Oh Dear also provides status page.…
Building Oh Dear’s new design: Project setup
We are currently rebuilding the Oh Dear website and application frontend. The goal is to go next level in aesthetics and user experience. The Oh Dear redesign will be launched later this year. In this post, you'll read more about the project setup and tools used. This is the first blog post of a…
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 the health of your application and server
We're proud to announce that we have added a major new feature to Oh Dear: Application Health monitoring. Using Oh Dear, you can now monitor various aspects of your application and server. This way, you could get alerts when: disk space is running low the database is down the load on your server is…
How we improved our service in 2021
We launched in January of 2018, and not a year has gone by where we made significant improvements to our service. Last year we wrote a recap of everything that we did in 2020. With the end of 2021 quickly approaching, let's take a look at all the things we did in the past 12 months. Adding more…
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…
Introducing our new support bubble
Like most SaaS products, Oh Dear is a living platform. We add new features proposed by our users, fix bugs that get reported, and regrettable also sometimes introduce new bugs. Most users use email to communicate with us. Even though sending an email is often perceived as friction-free, it can be a…
