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.

Single Sign-On is now generally available in Oh Dear, on every plan. Your team signs in with the credentials they already have, and you manage access from one place: your identity provider.

AI coding agents like Claude Code and Codex are becoming a real part of developer workflows. They don't just write code, they call APIs, interpret responses, and take action based on what they find. That means the quality of your API responses directly affects how useful an agent can be. We've shipped a series of improvements to the Oh Dear API with this in mind. Every change helps humans too, but we specifically optimized for how agents consume and reason about data.

AI coding agents are getting good at calling tools. Claude Code, Codex, and others can run shell commands, parse JSON, and reason about the results. But they need to know what tools are available and how to use them. That's what skills are for. A skill is a small package of documentation that teaches an AI agent how to use a specific tool. We've built one for Oh Dear.

Oh Dear's dashboard now supports dark mode. You can choose between light, dark, or system-based theming, and your preference is saved to your profile so it follows you everywhere.

Oh Dear has always been a desktop-first tool. If you checked your monitors on your phone, you'd get the full desktop layout squeezed into a tiny screen, with lots of horizontal scrolling and tiny tap targets. That's fixed now. Every page in the app works on mobile.

Your domain is on a spam blocklist. Password reset emails aren't arriving, order confirmations land in spam, and customers are complaining that "your site doesn't work." By the time you hear about it, the damage has been building for days. We've shipped DNS blocklist monitoring to catch this early. Oh Dear now checks your domain against 11 major blocklists and notifies you the moment you're listed, with direct links to get removed.

Our documentation, FAQ, and blog posts can now be served as clean markdown to AI agents. Send Accept: text/markdown or append.md to the URL, and you get structured content instead of a full HTML page. It worked great in development. Then we deployed, and two separate caching layers broke everything.