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.
Improvements to our notification system for sending alerts
We added a series of improvements to our notifications settings, making it easier for you to control where your alerts are sent. A new look for our notifications settings # Here's what the new notification screen now looks like. If you've been using Oh Dear for a while, you'll notice we completely…
How we identified clients with SSL certificates affected by Let's Encrypt mass-revocation
Yesterday, we sent out notifications to all our clients 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 shape to do a proper write-up on the…
Notifying users of revoked Let's Encrypt certificates
The team at Let's Encrypt, the free certificate authority, has identified an issue that might have lead to unauthorized certificate issuance. Because it's hard to determine which sites have been abused, they have no other choice but to revoke all certificates that may have been maliciously issued.…
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…
Win a chance to get a free year of Oh Dear monitoring
We just launched our complete redesign with an updated logo, and to celebrate we're giving away a full year of monitoring services! To enter the contest, all you need to do is complete the form below - we'll pick the lucky winner in two weeks. <script…
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 next steps for security: mixed content checking more important than ever
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…
How we used Caddy and Laravel's subdomain routing to serve our status pages
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…
Introducing status pages for all our users!
We're proud to introduce a new major feature to all our Oh Dear users: Status Pages! Our new Status Pages feature # All our users will now find a Status Pages feature in their dashboard, in the top level navigation. It allows you to create one or more status pages to keep your users informed in case…
Improving our broken links checker & mixed content reporting
We're excited to announce that we've shipped some nice improvements to our broken links & mixed content checks. These checks both make use of the crawler that powers those features. Increasing the amount of pages we crawl # When we first launched Oh Dear!, we decided to limit the crawls to the…
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…
Crawling internal vs. external URLs is now a setting
We've added a setting that allows you to choose if we should crawl all internal URLs or the external URLs too. Per-site settings for external URLs # You can now overwrite, per website, if we should probe the outgoing links of your site too. This is a powerful setting if you want to make sure your…
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. More uptime monitoring capabilities # We've had the option to monitor websites via a GET request since the very launch. It allows us to probe and test 99% of the sites out there…
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…
You can now specify to who we should send your invoice
We've added a small but useful feature to Oh Dear! last month, which allows you to customize the recipient of your invoices. It's not a big feature, but small & incremental improvements make Oh Dear! better one step at a time. You can customize the recipient per team on your team profile page.…
Why full service agency Marbles choose Oh Dear! for its 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…
Oh Dear! integration in Tideways
We've partnered with Tideways to highlight application downtime within its PHP Profiler. This will allow you to easily correlate downtime events with your application exceptions being thrown. About Tideways # Tideways is an advanced PHP profiler that has quickly become a must-have for a PHP…
Adding uptime capacity for our mates down under
Last week we finished adding more uptime monitoring capacity for our users that are working out of Australia, to provide faster uptime monitoring. Faster uptime monitoring, latency matters If the network packets need to travel half the world, it adds up to a noticeable amount of latency when…
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…
Just for Black Friday, we're doubling our prices
Black Friday. Everyone's throwing out coupon codes with crazy discounts, right? Why on earth would we be doubling our price for just that day? $price === $value # For many online services, Black Friday is a huge source of income. Webshops reportedly double or even triple their revenue that day. Many…
Introducing the Oh Dear! plugin for Laravel Nova
Today we released our new open source package called nova-ohdear-tool. It's meant to be installed into a Laravel Nova app. Laravel Nova is a package that allows you to easily create admin panels for Laravel applications. You'll find the installation instructions in the documentation section of Oh…
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…
The start of the Oh Dear! blog
Welcome to the Oh Dear blog! We'll share some of our internals, how we run Oh Dear!, the challenges we face and how we decide to tackle them. Expect a mix of technical insights, some business-related posts and a few customer success stories. We want to be as open as we can be about our monitoring…
How We Scaled Our Monitoring Solution To Over A Million Checks a Day Using Boring Technology
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