Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Today, next to Ping and TCP monitoring, we've also launched a new PHP SDK package, which has been rebuilt from scratch using the wonderful Saloon library. Using our new SDK, you can easily use the entire Oh Dear API. In this blog post, I'd like to show you how you can use the new SDK and how it works under the hood.

Whenever you visit a website or click on a link, there’s a whole conversation happening behind the scenes between your browser and the web server. That conversation includes something called HTTP status codes and knowing what they mean can help you make a diagnosis, so to speak. Usually, everything goes smoothly (like a 200 OK), but sometimes things break (looking at you, 404 and 500).

One of the core features of Oh Dear is that we can notify you whenever we detect problems with one of your sites. Our notification system is quite powerful. We support many different channels (like email, Slack, Telegram, ... and a whole bunch more), and have fine-grained control over which events should trigger a notification. Today, we've added notification logs.

Whether you're keeping a personal blog or manage a corporate site or online storefront, website downtime can cost money and can damage your reputation. Let alone when you're maintaining a bunch of different client sites. And while downtime can't always be prevented, it's really easy to at least keep track of things, and diagnose potential issues from there. So, let’s start with the easy part.

SEO is in a weird place right now. About one in five LinkedIn posts in my feed currently claims that SEO is dead, or has been assimilated by LLMs. Do not be remiss, dearest reader, because even an LLM still uses search engines like Google and Bing for web crawling. In other words, SEO still matters, a lot. Additionally, it's never a bad idea to keep tabs your website's SEO performance.

A critical security vulnerability was recently discovered in Livewire v3 that allows remote code execution, as Stephen Rees-Carter reported on Securing Laravel. While patches are released quickly, many applications remain vulnerable because developers simply don't know about the issue yet. Oh Dear's Application Health monitoring solves this by continuously checking your production environment for security vulnerabilities and immediately notifying you when issues are detected.

When you're managing a handful of client sites, setting things up manually is fine. Though if you're managing dozens of them, you're going to think twice about your approach. For agencies, development teams and platforms who are responsible for loads of websites, having to repeat the same configuration over and over is not only inefficient but also more prone to errors. That’s where this blog post comes in handy.

I'm pleased to share that we've can now notify you via Google Chat. Here's what that looks like: Our Google Chat notifications include: You can read more on how to set up Google Chat notifications in our docs. Of course, we also offer numerous other channels to notify you when something is wrong with your site. I'm pleased to share that we've can now notify you via Google Chat.

Today we are releasing oh-dear-api-examples a brand-new open-source repository on GitHub. It curates bite-size scripts, helpers and ideas for helping you bulk-manage your Oh Dear account via the API.

Clients expect transparency - especially when things go wrong. But manually updating a status page during an incident or maintenance window slows you down when speed matters most. Oh Dear’s status pages are more than just a pretty uptime dashboard. They’re fully API-driven and designed to scale with your workflow. Whether you manage five client sites or five hundred, you can create, update and sync status pages as needed. Here’s how to do it.