A Monitoring Tool Built by Developers and Ops
Oh Dear launched in 2018 with two founders who brought complementary expertise to website monitoring. Freek Van der Herten, an agency owner and prolific open-source developer, represents the developer perspective—focused on what visitors see, including every feature, link, and page. Their founding insight was that comprehensive site monitoring requires both viewpoints. A typical monitoring tool focuses on either uptime or performance from one angle, missing critical parts of the picture. Oh Dear was built to combine both the developer's and operator's views, creating a tool that covers your entire site health. This dual-perspective approach shaped the product's development from day one.
What Oh Dear Monitors Across Your Website
Oh Dear offers a comprehensive monitoring suite built around several core capabilities. Uptime monitoring runs every minute from multiple locations, so you know instantly when your site goes offline. SSL certificate monitoring watches your certificates and alerts you well in advance of expiration, preventing the embarrassment of a padlock disappearing from browsers. Broken link detection crawls every page of your site to flag links leading nowhere. Mixed content detection catches assets loading over insecure HTTP connections that could break your padlock. Scheduled task monitoring tracks cron jobs, alerting you when they run late, fail, or stop running entirely. Performance monitoring measures page load speeds to catch slowdowns before they impact user experience. Finally, Oh Dear provides hosted status pages that keep your users informed when issues occur, so they don't have to guess what's happening.
Who Should Choose Oh Dear for Site Monitoring
Oh Dear is ideal for any team responsible for maintaining website health—whether that's a developer, agency, or operations team. If you're running a production website, the uptime monitoring alone pays for itself by catching outages before customers report them. Developers will appreciate the broken link detection and mixed content checking, which catch issues that affect user experience. If you maintain any automated tasks, cron job monitoring prevents failed background jobs from silently breaking your site's functionality. For agencies managing multiple client sites, Oh Dear's multi-location uptime checks ensure you're monitoring from perspectives that matter to your actual users. The included status page feature is valuable if you have a user base that needs transparency during incidents. Start with the free 10-day trial to evaluate whether the combination of developer-focused and operations-focused monitoring features meets your needs.
Common questions
What does Oh Dear monitor on my site?
Oh Dear monitors uptime checked every minute, SSL certificate expiration, broken links across pages, DNS issues, cron job failures, and website performance. You'll get alerts before problems affect your visitors.
Can I try Oh Dear before committing?
Yes, Oh Dear provides a free 10-day trial so you can test all monitoring features without payment. This gives you time to evaluate uptime tracking, certificate monitoring, link checking, and performance insights.