One of the most unique features Oh Dear offers is the broken links and mixed content crawler. We will crawl your site for all links, reporting any broken pages to your defined notification channels. Recently, we encountered degraded performance with our crawler service due to a breaking change in an underlying library called Guzzle. This caused HTTP 505 responses on the first page of each site, blocking further crawling and resulting in false positive reports.

Our service can detect various problems with your website: whenever it is down, or a broken link is detected, your cron job isn't running on time, and much much more. Whenever we see a problem we can notify you via email, Slack, webhooks, and various other channels. Up until now, you could configure these notification channels in our UI, but now you can do this via our API as wel.

This week we introduced two new updates to enhance the user/team security administration. These updates focus on improving the Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) setup and visibility for team management. Let’s take a look.

Downtime has always been shown in minutes, hours, and days but for shorter downtimes you would see "0m" even if the actual downtime was less than a minute. We've updated the UI to show downtime in seconds. This means no more manually calculating brief outages — you’ll see exactly how long the system was down :) Did you know you can add notes to downtime periods?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.