Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Over the weekend, my own site went down and Oh Dear didn't catch it. The origin server had fallen over, but Cloudflare happily kept serving the cached HTML. Everything looked fine from the outside. Embarrassing. Scratching our own itch here, we just shipped magic variables: short placeholders you can drop into your monitor URL, request headers, or POST payload. Right before each check, we replace them with fresh values, so every request is unique enough to slip past any cache and actually hit your origin.

The uptime & availability of our status pages hasn't been great these past few days. The root cause is a persistent and pretty aggressive DDoS attack targeted at our own status page, status.ohdear.app. As a result, the overload on our systems also affected all other status pages we host for clients. We're not yet at Github or Claude levels of uptime sadness, but this isn't acceptable to us. In this post, I'll share what's happening and what steps we've already taken.

Oh Dear keeps a watchful eye on your websites: uptime, performance, SSL certificates, broken links, DNS, cron jobs. If something can quietly break, we're already checking it for you. Today we're connecting that data to a new place: your AI assistant. We just shipped an MCP integration. If you use Claude, Cursor, or any other client that speaks the Model Context Protocol, you can now ask questions like "any broken links on my site?" or "when does my certificate expire?" in plain language.