Oh Dear is a comprehensive website monitoring platform founded by Freek Van der Herten. It goes well beyond uptime checks — it monitors SSL certificates, crawls for broken links, tracks performance, watches cron jobs, checks DNS, and generates public status pages. It's a single subscription that replaces several point tools.
Oh Dear checks your sites from multiple locations simultaneously, which reduces false positives from regional network issues. SSL certificate monitoring tracks expiry dates and notifies you in advance, so you're never caught out by a lapsed cert. Both checks run continuously and alert you through whichever notification channel you've configured.
One of the more useful features is the site crawler, which checks for broken links, redirect chains, and mixed content across your entire site — not just the homepage. Performance monitoring uses Lighthouse under the hood to track load time and Core Web Vitals over time, which is useful if you care about SEO or just want a baseline to measure against after deployments.
Oh Dear can monitor scheduled tasks by expecting a heartbeat ping at regular intervals. If your cron job silently fails, you'll know about it. Application health endpoints let you expose internal status — queue depth, database connectivity, disk space — and Oh Dear will alert if anything drops below your defined thresholds.
Oh Dear is a paid service with no permanent free tier, though trials are available. It's built by the Spatie team and is particularly popular in the Laravel community. Pricing scales with the number of sites monitored.
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