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.
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…
Sites can now be grouped
Our users sometimes have a large number of applications that are being monitored by Oh Dear. Some of these applications are related to each other. Think for instance of a marketing site and an API that are part of the same application. To better emphasise that some of the things that are monitored…
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 private status pages
You can now mark status pages as private, guarding them from the outside world unless you have the secret passphrase. Public status pages # We've had public status pages for quite a while. Many big brand names are also using them, like Laravel, VuetifyJS, Sex.com, ... and so many others. They're a…
User, team and billing sections have been revamped
When you log into your account, you'll notice some subtle and not so subtle changes. We slightly updated our theme, you'll see more rounded corners and tweaked colours of various things in our UI. New looks... # The big changes are to be seen in the user, team and billing sections. These screens…
Microsoft Teams notifications now available in Oh Dear
We've added Microsoft Teams notifications to Oh Dear for uptime, certificate, performance and broken links alerts! Microsoft Teams notifications # Users of Microsoft Teams can now add their MS Teams webhook to Oh Dear, and we'll be able to send notifications to the channel linked to that webhook.…
Snooze notifications until the next workday
When a site is down, Oh Dear sends a notification every hour. Since last year, our notifications can be snoozed for a fixed amount of time (5 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, one day). In the evenings and weekends, you might not want to receive repeated notifications. That's why we've added a nice human…
We're giving away a MacBook Air (M1) to one of our users!
In a few weeks, we'll be giving away a new MacBook Air (M1) to one of our clients. Update: we have a winner! See below for more details. Rewarding our existing clients # Most marketing efforts are focussed on attracting new clients. Thousands of dollars are being spent there. Yet, existing clients…
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.…
Adding even more uptime check locations to Oh Dear
We're starting this new year strong with an additional new 8 locations to check your websites from! Increasing our website monitoring coverage # We've just finished adding uptime capacity in the following locations: Asia: Seoul & Singapore US West: San Francisco & Los Angeles Middle-East:…
How we improved our service in 2020
In 2020 we slowly, but surely, improved our service. The UI has vastly improved and we added two major new features. Time for a recap! A fresh new look # In the first months of the year, we adopted a new logo and corporate identity. This also meant a redesigned marketing site to highlight our…
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…
A fresh new dashboard look!
We just launched our brand new monitoring dashboard to all clients, giving a modern new look & feel to Oh Dear! There are plenty of improvements under the hood, so let's dive right in. A fresh new dashboard # Here's what the new dashboard looks like. As usual, it auto-refreshes every 5 seconds…
Enjoy our Black Friday Deals
Black Friday is almost here, and you'll probably see a lot of discounts coming your way. At Oh Dear, our deals already start today! In the past, we doubled our prices. This year we're going to make things cheaper. You'll probably like that better. 🙂 You can get a discount of 30% on the first…
Our Black Friday special: Oh Dear is free, until we've proven 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…
Certificate lifetime limited to 1y since September 1st, 2020
Earlier this year, Apple announced that it would limit the lifetime of trusted certificates to 398 days. Shortly after, both Firefox and Chrome followed in their footsteps. Why limit the certificate lifetime? # The goal is to create a more secure web environment. By reducing the certificate lifetime…
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…
Adding action links to Oh Dear email notifications
Last week, we improved the email notifications sent by Oh Dear whenever something is down or broken. They now contain links that allow you to snooze further emails, essentially "silencing" the alert for a defined period of time. When a snooze link is clicked, you'll be taken to a page…
Adding preventive revocation alerts to our certificate monitoring
As part of our SSL certificate monitoring, we check a lot of things. The usuals, like if it covers the right domain name or if it hasn't expired are, of course, already included. But SSL certificates can get quite complex. Sometimes, SSL certificates get revoked by the issuer. When that happens,…
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…
You can now disable team-level notification settings per site
We've added the ability to disable the team-level notification settings on a per-site basis. This allows for even more flexibility in the way you set up and configure your alerts! Recap: team-level notifications # Most of our users configure their notification preferences on the team-level. This…
Adding postcard notifications to our alerts
Imagine: you live in a forest. You're cut off from technology. You don't trust mobile phones. The mailman comes ones a week to check up on you. He's the only person you talk to. His name is Mike and he's super into knitting. You get along fine. In this situation, how would you know if your website…
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…
