What's new in OnlineOrNot
April 19, 2024 - Deeper cron job support with heartbeat checks
OnlineOrNot now supports monitoring even the most complicated cron schedules with Heartbeat Checks.
To get started:
- add the cron expression and server timezone in the UI:
- add
curl oonchk.com/your_id_hereto your cron job - get immediate alerts via Email, SMS, Slack, PagerDuty, and more when it fails to run
April 2, 2024 - Manage status pages through the API
Manually setting up a single status page can be fine, but what if you have dozens, or even hundreds of pages to manage?
To make this easier, OnlineOrNot now provides API endpoints for managing status pages, status page components, and status page incidents.
I've also begun work on an official terraform provider for OnlineOrNot, soon you'll be able to manage status pages (and more) through an infrastructure-as-code setup.
March 23, 2024 - Reminder alerts
You might get a notification from OnlineOrNot during a meeting, and not realise your website never came back online.
To make sure this doesn't happen accidentally, OnlineOrNot now sends reminder notifications for Slack, Discord, SMS, and email alerts until your website/API or cron job comes back online. You can tweak the frequency under a Check's alert settings.
March 05, 2024 - First-party SMS alerts, Status Page improvements and more
In February, I focused on quality of life improvements for Status Pages and Uptime Checks. While they aren't big features, they will enable big features later on.
What's new
Uptime Check Improvements- OnlineOrNot now supports sending SMS alerts for folks on the paid plans, without the need for your own Twilio account
To configure it, you need to add a phone number in your user profile, and your Uptime Check needs to have "Alert Priority" set to "High" - Uptime Checks now support checking from India
- The Uptime Checks results history table now displays why an Uptime Check failed when the reason is an assertion failure or the text to search for wasn't found
- When creating a Status Page, you no longer need to specify the components you want to keep track of to be able to create the Status Page
- Components now display their individual status on a Status Page
- You can now re-order Status Page components in the OnlineOrNot application
- You can now disable the displaying of historical uptime for a component on a Status Page (useful for when you have many components, and just want to display the current status compactly)
February 03, 2024 - Adopting OpenAPI, and better observability
New OpenAPI Schema and API documentation
OnlineOrNot's public API was originally written to serve a single purpose: provide data for the CLI. The documentation for the API was handwritten, and lovingly placed alongside OnlineOrNot's other hand-written docs.
Back in December, I automated this process (I wrote more about the technical details here), and today I'm publishing an automatically updated OpenAPI schema and a new API documentation hub:
Better Observability
Up until now, OnlineOrNot would only ever tell you if your website or API was up or down, and roughly how long your website or API took to serve a request. Actually figuring out what was wrong was "left as an exercise for the reader", like an academic textbook.
As a user of OnlineOrNot, you would have one of two reactions to this:
I better investigate my logs around that time, see if the database backup job isn't accidentally killing our website at the same time.
Nah, that's a false alarm, no way the website goes down at exactly 2am every single day.
To remedy this, in January I focused on making every request result (HTTP status code, region it checked from, response time, date and time checked) available in the dashboard, as well as the request/response metadata (request headers, response headers and response body).
Every uptime check in OnlineOrNot now displays a list of recent checks:
with an option to view all checks, and filter by failing checks:
December 1, 2023 - New status page features: dark mode, new graphs, and a YouTube channel
Dark Mode for Status Pages
A common ask from folks (and their own customers) is to make OnlineOrNot Status Pages less blinding when viewed on a system that has a dark-mode theme enabled.
So we now support dark mode:
By default, OnlineOrNot Status Pages will use the user's system theme to decide whether to default to dark mode or not. Dark mode itself can be toggled by clicking the moon/sun icon at the bottom of each status page.
New graphs
While compact, OnlineOrNot's old Status Page graphs were often difficult to read, and tried to pack too much information into a small space.
We now have new graphs:
The new graphs are:
- interactive, with tooltips displaying each data point
- visually larger, with y-axis grid lines for easier reading
You can add metrics graphs to your OnlineOrNot Status Pages by adding uptime checks to them, as described in this support article.
Documentation as a YouTube channel
While OnlineOrNot has a fairly comprehensive set of documentation, not everyone learns best by reading. To remedy this, I started a dedicated YouTube Channel for OnlineOrNot, and a Screencasts page, where folks can visually learn how to configure OnlineOrNot for their use case:
Want a feature explained in a video? Let me know!
October 2, 2023 - Cron Job Monitoring, on-call integrations, and more
Cron job monitoring
I mainly spent September refining cron job monitoring functionality - the system handles millions of cron job checks per day, and is now production-ready.
Cron job monitoring flips how OnlineOrNot works in reverse: instead of checking your website to see if it's online, with cron job monitoring you tell OnlineOrNot if your cron job/scheduled task/IoT device/internet connection is still online via HTTP request, and if the time between requests is too long, you'll get an alert.
After a bit of feedback (particular thanks to Jens!) from OnlineOrNot's customers, quite a few things got built and fixed for cron job monitoring:
- You can now display the status of your cron job on our status pages, and have OnlineOrNot automatically open and close incidents based on your cron job monitoring
- You can now send alerts about your cron jobs to the following places:
- SMS
- Discord/Slack
- Webhooks
- On-call integrations: PagerDuty/Opsgenie/Grafana OnCall/Spike.sh
- Cron job monitoring now lives on its own dedicated infrastructure, redundantly across several AWS regions
- Fixed several bugs in the heartbeat monitoring graphs
On-call integrations
On-call integrations aren't just for cron job monitoring by the way!
Back in late July I added support for uptime checks to alert based on your team's existing on-call roster for:
June 8, 2023 - Multiple Slack channels, and more
The headline feature is that I've updated how Slack integrations work with OnlineOrNot: you can now disable Slack alerts for an uptime check, or even pick which channel alerts should go to. Folks on the Team plan and above can add multiple Slack channels, and send alerts directly to individual people in your Slack.
Not everyone uses Slack of course, there were other updates:
- Admins of OnlineOrNot teams can now remove people from a team
- You can now monitor entire HTML tags with the "Text to search for" setting in Uptime Checks
- OnlineOrNot has been accepted as a "known bot" in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This means once GA4 updates (I'm told this will happen by June 23), uptime checks won't appear in your GA4 analytics anymore
- Cron Job Monitoring is now available as a beta preview. The feature is still being refined in beta, but now anyone can try them out.
March 14, 2023 - Announcing multi-location, and geo-specific monitoring
OnlineOrNot now lets you decide where we should run your check from.
To start with, we support:
- US East
- US West
- Europe
- Australia
- Japan
You can pick all of these locations, or just one - it's up to you!
March 6, 2023 - Uptime Checks every 30 seconds
All paid customers of OnlineOrNot now have access to uptime checks every 30 seconds.
This is particularly useful if you want to know if your website, web app, or API is down really fast, or to catch sub-minute outages.
March 1, 2023 - Public API and CLI
You can now check on your uptime checks from the comfort of your own terminal, thanks to our newly released open-source CLI.
On top of that, you can also write your own code to add and remove checks, and double check your uptime checks via the API.
For information on how to set it up, see our CLI documentation and API documentation.
August 23, 2022 - Private Status Pages
You can now keep your status pages private by setting a password on them.
This is useful if you want to share your status page with your team, but don't want to share it with the public.
For more information, as well as instructions on how to set it up, see our documentation.
July 12, 2022 - Status Pages
You can now automatically keep your users up to date when your site goes down, thanks to OnlineOrNot Status Pages.
As this is an initial release, it's limited in functionality. However in the coming months, you'll be able to add any uptime monitoring service as a source, and your users will be able to subscribe to updates across Email, Slack/Discord, and SMS.
We have documentation for:
March 21, 2022 - SMS via Twilio
You can now bring your Twilio account to OnlineOrNot, and receive unlimited SMS alerts when things go wrong!
For more information, check out the docs.
February 28, 2022 - SSL verification
OnlineOrNot now supports SSL verification!
If while doing a routine check, OnlineOrNot notices that your website's SSL certificate is no longer valid, we'll let you know as per your alert settings.
February 2, 2022 - Alert after several failed checks
The internet can be a pretty flaky place, and sometimes you only want to be notified if a check has failed several times sequentially.
OnlineOrNot now lets all users delay their alerts until they've been failing several times in a row (this feature used to be only for customers on paid plans).
January 5, 2022 - Uptime Checks on the go
Sometimes you just want to see how your sites are doing at a glance.
OnlineOrNot now has first-class support for mobile in its web app, having redesigned the main dashboard to make it easier to see all your checks at a glance.
November 29, 2021 - Assertions
Monitoring that your website or API is still running is great and all, but there's no guarantee that the data coming back is correct.
A few weeks ago with the release of our API Monitoring feature, we promised a way to run more advanced correctness checks.
Today we're releasing Assertions - a way to check that your API is responding the way you expect it to.
November 16, 2021 - API Monitoring
Before today, OnlineOrNot had only basic API monitoring support: you could monitor your API endpoint with GET requests.
Today we're launching our API Monitoring support with the following features:
- Setting HTTP request method (GET, POST, etc)
- Setting HTTP request body
- Setting HTTP request custom headers
- Following redirects
In the coming weeks you'll also be able to make requests with HTTP Authorization, verify HTTP status codes, and perform more advanced correctness checks.
October 21, 2021 - Uptime and Browser Checks, Around the World
OnlineOrNot's Uptime and Browser Checks have always automatically checked around the world before alerting you that your website is down. However, unless you were a paying customer, the first check would come from Virginia, USA by default.
(This lead to some interesting false-positives for those of us with clients that geo-block certain regions from visiting their sites!)
As of today, you can now pick which one of our supported regions OnlineOrNot monitors from, on all new and existing Uptime and Browser Checks!
See it in action (7 MB GIF)October 4, 2021 - Discord Alerts
Not a fan of Slack? If your team is using Discord, as of today you can send all of your notifications to a channel in Discord.
Head over to the Docs for more details, or skip the details and add the Discord integration to your OnlineOrNot account.
August 19, 2021 - Alert Priority and Pausing checks
When you're running scheduled maintenance, the last thing you need is a noisy uptime check spamming your team.
OnlineOrNot now provides you with two more ways to control your alerting.
- Alert Priority - define your alerts as either High priority, or Low priority. When low priority uptime checks fail, you'll receive fewer alerts. For more information, check out the docs.
- Pausing Checks - completely stop your uptime checks from running, anytime you want. Particularly useful for when you know your page will flip/flop while recovering from maintenance, and you don't want to be alerted. For more information, check out the docs.
June 22, 2021 - Browser Checks
Tired of looking for uptime checks for your client-rendered web app, and winding up disappointed that client-side rendered apps (using React, Vue, or Angular) aren't supported?
As of today, OnlineOrNot supports running Google's Puppeteer to drive a browser that checks your web app is working as expected.
Check out our pricing to see plan inclusions.
May 28, 2021 - Webhook Alerts
Webhook Alerts are here! Users on paid plans can now receive JSON, to any provided URL for incidents.
For more details, including sample JSON, see the docs.
May 11, 2021 - SMS Alerts
SMS Alerts are here! Users on paid plans are now able to receive SMS alerts for incidents.
Particularly handy for when you mute Slack and Email notifications overnight, but still want an alert to wake you up if things go wrong.
Mar 28, 2021 - Weekly uptime report
For easier reporting, OnlineOrNot now sends a weekly email every Monday at midnight UTC with a summary of your pages' uptime percentage, downtime (in minutes), and number of incidents.
Mar 14, 2021 - Retries and waiting before alerting
Sometimes you've got a particularly flaky site that tends to go down for less than a minute, a few times a day. You figure it's not a big deal, but you're not sure how to silence the alerts.
OnlineOrNot now provides you with two ways to control how many alerts your monitors send you.
- Retries - Retries let you specify how many times you want to re-check a site before giving up
- Alert after several failures - It's now possible to wait until several sequential checks have failed before sending an alert
Mar 13, 2021 - Slack Alerts
Don't want to risk missing alerts in your email inbox? Now you don't have to!
As of today, you can now choose to receive your OnlineOrNot alerts in Slack, so anyone on your team that's interested in your alerts can see what's happening.
Mar 9, 2021 - Search for text
Sometimes pages will return the HTTP status code you expect (HTTP 200), but display a white screen. In these cases, you want a monitor that can check if some text is on the page, to know everything is alright.
As of today, both free and paid users are able to search for text on the pages they monitor.
Mar 7, 2021 - Monitor 5x as often!
Outages can often start and finish within five minutes, leaving your monitoring completely blind to what happened.
Customers on paid plans are now able to monitor their pages every minute, rather than every five minutes, to avoid this issue.
Mar 5, 2021 - Email notifications
You can now receive outage notifications via email!
OnlineOrNot will send you an email if a page becomes unreachable, and another email when it comes back again.
Mar 3, 2021 - Initial release
You can now try out OnlineOrNot.
Its first release is fairly limited: You can monitor sites, and see in a dashboard if the site is online, or not.
