We launched in January of 2018, and not a year has gone by where we made significant improvements to our service. Last year we wrote a recap of everything that we did in 2020. With the end of 2021 quickly approaching, let's take a look at all the things we did in the past 12 months.
We can now notify you of changing DNS records and let you know when we've detected a problem with your domain nameservers. Woohoo! 🥳
A good deal of sites redirect visitors to a specific more relevant page. Think, for instance, of a site that redirects you from / to a page in a relevant language, for instance /en or /nl. A single redirect is often not a problem, but having multiple redirects in a chain can hinder your site's user experience. Modern browsers also limit the number of redirects.
When something is wrong with your site, we can already notify you via a lot of different channels: mail, Slack, SMS, Webhooks, ... Today, we're adding support for Telegram notifications. We've polished the entire connection flow and made the notifications themselves interactive.
If you've been using Let's Encrypt for a while, you may have noticed that their certificates are signed by a root certificate titled DST Root CA X3. That root certificate is set to expire in a few hours. Any certificates still signed by that root will no longer be valid. But luckily, that shouldn't form a problem for most Let's Encrypt users. For a while now, new SSL issuances by Let's Encrypt have issued certificates against DST Root CA X3 (the one that is about to expire) and ISRG Root X1.
Keeping an eye on your site and sending you a notification when it goes down is one of the core features of Oh Dear. Under the hood, we'll send a request to your site and take a look if the response code is in the 200-299 range, which is the default response code range to indicate that everything is ok. Some of our users are monitoring password protected sites. In such cases, the web server might reply with status code 401 (unauthorised).
Like most SaaS products, Oh Dear is a living platform. We add new features proposed by our users, fix bugs that get reported, and regrettable also sometimes introduce new bugs. Most users use email to communicate with us. Even though sending an email is often perceived as friction-free, it can be a minor hurdle. We've introduced a little support bubble at the bottom of every page to make it easier for our users to pass us feature requests and report bugs.
When we detect something wrong with your site (it is down, a broken link is detected, the certificate is invalid, ...), we can notify you via one of the many notification channels we support. One of those channels is Pushover, an excellent service to send native notifications to mobile devices. We have supported Pushover since we launched a couple of years ago. Now, we've added a nice option that several of our users we're asking for: setting the priority.
Our users sometimes have a large number of applications that are being monitored by Oh Dear. Some of these applications are related to each other. Think for instance of a marketing site and an API that are part of the same application. To better emphasise that some of the things that are monitored are related, you can now use groups. When you start monitoring a site at Oh Dear, you can now optionally specify a group name.
If we look at the number of sites that our users monitor, we can split our user base into two large groups. Teams in the first group only monitor one or a couple of sites. The second group monitors 30 or more sites. We've just launched new features that make user management more flexible for large teams. In this blog post, we'd like to tell you all about it.
