OnlineOrNot updates from April 2024
Max Rozen / May 06, 2024
In April I kept focusing on making Status Pages better than ever, and added a new on-call integration: incident.io.
Table of contents
What's new
The free checker returns
OnlineOrNot originally started back in 2021 as a tiny form at https://onlineornot.com, letting you enter a URL, and the system would check the URL from around the world.
As I added more features, I needed space on the home page to describe all the functionality OnlineOrNot supported, and eventually I removed the free checker.
It's back now, and better than ever at Is this website down?
OnlineOrNot x Incident.io integration
Incident.io lets you manage incidents entirely within your Slack, handle on-call, manage runbooks, and learn from your incidents with post-incident reviews.
If you've dreamed of being able to raise an incident because your daily database backup didn't run (frankly, I get it), you'll want to check this out:
With the integration, OnlineOrNot supports sending alerts from all uptime checks, as well as cron job/scheduled task checks to incident.io. Once in incident.io, the member of your team currently on-call can be notified, an incident raised, and a post-mortem written, all from the comfort of your own Slack.
Status Page Component Groups
Your status page can get a little busy once you've added your own system components next to components from your vendors and other third parties.
Grouping your components lets you separate your system into logical parts, to make it easier to understand your status at a glance.
As a common example, let's say you've integrated deeply with OpenAI (and a few other vendors), and want to let your customers know when issues with their services may impact your own:
Even with a single third-party vendor, it starts to become difficult to see where your service ends, and theirs begins.
Grouping simplifies things:
Cron expression support
OnlineOrNot now supports monitoring even the most complicated cron schedules with heartbeat checks. Particular thanks to Martin for raising this feature request by replying to a monthly update email!
While getting an alert when your cron job fails to run "every day" is great, sometimes you have jobs you only want to run at midnight every weekday (0 0 * * 1-5):
What's next
This section is always difficult to write, if I'm totally honest: software estimation is always a challenge.
Regardless, here's the minimum that I aim to release this month:
- Scheduled maintenance for status pages
- Retrospective incidents for status pages
- Additional external status pages
Thank you
OnlineOrNot only exists because of folks like you. I don't have a massive marketing budget, OnlineOrNot gets its users from folks like you enjoying it enough to tell your friends and colleagues about it.
So here's an ask:
I work on the things that people care enough about to tell me about them. If you think there's something missing, or something that needs improving, I'd like to know more!
You can either reply to this email/email me at max@onlineornot.com, or book time in my calendar if you'd like to chat face-to-face.