Oh Dear

Antwerp, Belgium
2017
  |  By Mattias Geniar
Over these past few weeks, we've updated our Ubuntu 20.04 LTS uptime servers to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. The reason was mostly just staying up-to-date, but we had a surprising side-effect that was unexpected but very welcome.
  |  By Freek Van der Herten
For each site and status page in your account, we now offer badges that you can use to show the status of your site or service everywhere you want. Technically these badges are svg's, so they are very lightweight to embed.
  |  By Freek Van der Herten
Recently, people started talking about a malware called “Androxgh0st” specifically targeting Laravel apps. In a recent edition of Securing Laravel, Stephen Rees-Carter wrote a good explanation of how it works. The malware targets apps with APP_DEBUG set to true. When enabled, Laravel will give detailed error messages, and some security features will be disabled. In production, you always want this value to be set to false.
  |  By Freek Van der Herten
As you probably know, Oh Dear is run by a small but capable team. One of the advantages of being small is that we can implement stuff pretty quickly: there’s no red tape, and our code base is very healthy. So, when our users have feature requests that make sense to add to Oh Dear, we can move fast. In the past month, we implemented two smallish feature requests for our DNS check we got through support. Here’s what our new DNS settings screens look like.
  |  By Freek Van der Herten
Today, we released the ohdearapp/ohdear-pulse package, which contains Laravel Pulse cards to show you the status of your scheduled jobs, any broken links you have in your Laravel app, and uptime / HTTP performance stats. All of these cards use the Oh Dear API to fetch their data. Laravel Pulse is a first party package that can display a dashboard with information surrounding usage and performance of your Laravel app. Here’s how a default installation looks like.
  |  By Freek Van der Herten
We are happy to announce that we have upgraded our Lighthouse check from v9 to the latest version, Lighthouse v11. Lighthouse is an open-source tool by Google that helps developers improve the quality of their web pages. Oh Dear can run this check frequently for your site, informing you when SEO-related problems arise. Our check may suggest optimizing images or minifying JavaScript to improve performance.
  |  By Freek Van der Herten
Besides monitoring your site's uptime, Oh Dear offers many other checks to monitor all kinds of aspects of your web app. One of those checks is our DNS check. Whenever we detect problems with your DNS records or when one of the DNS records changes, we can notify you. By default, we only monitor the DNS records of the domain you are monitoring. So when you're monitoring example.com, we'll only monitor the records of that hostname. A CNAME record is a special kind of DNS record.
  |  By Freek Van der Herten
The most popular check that Oh Dear offers is, without a doubt, our uptime check. It's enabled for almost every site we monitor. By default, this check will notify you when your site returns a non-2xx response, but you can greatly customize that behavior. You can check if the response has certain headers, if the response contains a particular string, and more! Some of our users requested a new behavior: checking the absence of a string on the response.
  |  By Freek Van der Herten
Whenever we detects something wrong with your site it can send you a notification. We have multiple channels available: Slack, Telegram, webhooks, and many more. The most popular channel our users use is just a simple mail. Behind the scenes, Oh Dear uses Postmark to send out mails. Postmark will inform us whenever a notification mail results in a hard bounce. A hard bounce means that the mail won't be delivered. The most common reason for this is that the mailbox doesn't exist (anymore).
  |  By Freek Van der Herten
Since Oh Dear was launched, we offered a traditional login using the familiar email and password combination. Today, we've launched our social login. This feature allows you to use your Google or GitHub account to log into Oh Dear. You'll see these two new buttons on the registration and login page. When clicking one, we'll use your Google or GitHub account to log in. When logging in, we'll search for an Oh Dear account whose email matches the email used for your Google / GitHub account.
  |  By Oh Dear
In this talk given at Laracon India 2023, I go a short demo of all features of oh dear.
  |  By Oh Dear

Learn how this Livewire powered screen works:
https://freek.dev/1622-replacing-web-sockets-with-livewire

  |  By Oh Dear

Website monitoring should be simple, intuitive & affordable. That's why we built Oh Dear!

We offer multi-location uptime monitoring, mixed content & broken links detection and SSL certificate & transparency reporting. There's an API and kick-ass documentation too.

Here's what Oh Dear! has to offer:

  • Uptime Monitoring: Worried your site might go down? We monitor from multiple locations and will report any downtime. Our probes run worldwide and alert you via Slack, mail or a webhook of your choice.
  • Certificate Monitoring: Expiration dates, revocation lists, certificate changes, distrusted certificate authorities,... you name it, we monitor it.
  • Mixed Content Monitoring: Loading HTTP content on an HTTPS site is blocked in browsers as it poses a security risk. Our scans will list all pages on your site that have mixed content.
  • Broken Links Detection: Nobody wants to hit a 404 page. We can automatically notify you as soon as we detect a broken link on your site.
  • Loved by Humans & Developers: Our human users are happy with the documentation and speed, developers will love the API and webhooks that allow you to automate Oh Dear! as you see fit.
  • Instant Alerts: Get notified instantly when something goes wrong. Via e-mail, Slack, HipChat, SMS, Pushover... You decide how we can reach you.

Website monitoring. Without the hassle.