2024, and what's next

The other day I realized that while I write monthly updates on what's new in OnlineOrNot, and keep the changelog updated, I didn't have a yearly review of what was shipped, and what folks could expect from the coming year - so here we are!

Table of Contents

• What went live in 2024
  • General
  • Checks
  • Status Pages
• What's next

What went live in 2024

Taking a quick look through OnlineOrNot's code history for 2024 shows that I've made 1002 individual releases to OnlineOrNot's production environment over 235 working days, with quite a few bugfixes and UI tweaks too small to mention here.

The vast majority of these were implemented in the two hours I allow myself before full-time work, and sometimes I work on Saturday mornings.

Here are the highlights:

General

• adopted OpenAPI for automated API documentation, and more
• integrated with incident.io for alerting
• rewrote OnlineOrNot for Cloudflare Workers, and backported the changes to AWS to allow the same code to be run redundantly across the two cloud providers

Checks

• improved observability for why OnlineOrNot thinks a check failed
• added reminder alerts for all uptime checks, and scheduled task monitors
• added cron expression support for monitoring cron jobs

Status Pages

• made it possible to group status page components
• made it possible to track external services on your status page
• made it possible to manage status pages through the API
• added retrospective incidents
• added incident history for every status page
• added ip allowlisting for finer-grained status page privacy
• added scheduled maintenance
• made it possible to customize your favicon and logo
• integrated with pingdom as a source of incidents
• built an API endpoint for retrieving a status page's summary

What's next

As I mention on the About page, OnlineOrNot is 100% backed by its customers, and I expect to still be running it in 10 years. It goes without saying that I'm going to continue to focus on reliability, and ensuring OnlineOrNot is a tool that software teams can trust.

More specifically, I'm going to wrap up some status page features I didn't get to in 2024 (subscribe webhooks to a status page, display data from third-party sources, show a component's uptime history, incident postmortems, custom templates for creating incidents).

Uptime Checking and Cron Job Monitoring will see some love too, with better data display options in the dashboard and UI improvements.