Things have been a bit more quiet on this blog, but it’s only because my time & energy has been spent elsewhere. In the last couple of months, we launched some useful new additions to the Oh Dear! monitoring service.

• We crawl every site we monitor, to find broken links, errors, … you can now tell our crawler if we should stick to crawling your own domain, or follow the outgoing links too.
• In addition to monitoring GET requests, we can now also monitor POST, PUT & PATCH endpoints with custom payloads (aka: you can choose the form fields we submit in our monitoring probes). Very useful for testing logins, search results, API’s, …
• You can add a “Friendly Name” to your sites. Some URLs are – shall we say – less than pretty. If you have legacy old URLs that are too long, or you have internal names for your tooling, you can choose to use a custom display name for your alerts/notifications.
• Your invoices can now be sent to a custom email address (ie: straight to your accountant or finance department)
• There’s a public section on the Oh Dear! site, that allows you to check the uptime & certificate health of any website – without creating an account. Can’t reach a certain site? Let our uptime checks verify it from multiple location. That way, you can be sure it’s not you – it’s them.
• Our documentation has been extended with more info on how each checks works, how the API can be implemented, we’ve added a FAQ section, … too much to mention, really.

On top of that we shared tips on how to use our crawler to keep your cache warm or and we’ve been featured by Google as a prominent user of their new .app TLD. Cool!

In addition, we’re always looking for feedback. If you notice something we’re missing in terms of monitoring, reach out and we’ll see what we can do!