Platform
Changelog of 2024
Follow the updates and improvements made to the Phare platform in 2024.
Shield status badges
December 23rd, 2024 Shield status badges are now available for your status pages. You can embed these badges in your documentation, README files, or any other web page to show the current status of your services. Two types of badges are currently available, a status badge showing the overall status of your status page, and an availability badge showing the uptime percentage of your services.
Send test alert rule notifications
December 11th, 2024 Phare now lets you send test notifications for your configured alert rules. Whether you’re fine-tuning an alert or setting up a new monitor, you can see exactly how it works before going live. This is particularly useful for more complex alert rules, like outgoing webhooks, where you can verify that the payload is correctly formatted and received by your system. This release also includes some quality of life improvements around alert policies and rules.
Pushover integration
December 6th, 2024 Phare now supports Pushover, so you can get your alert notifications straight to your preferred device. Unlike other Pushover integrations you might have tried, Phare lets you set a custom priority for each type of notification, giving you fine-grained control over your alerts. Read the Pushover integration documentation to get started.
Quickly pause and resume monitors
November 22th, 2024 Monitors can now be paused and resumed directly from the monitor list. This feature allows you to quickly disable monitoring for a specific monitor without having to navigate to the monitor page.
Favicon support on status pages
November 22th, 2024 You can now customize the favicon displayed on your status pages. This feature allows you to add a personal touch to your status page and provide a more branded experience for your users.
Simplified TCP monitoring
November 20th, 2024 TCP monitoring has been simplified to make it easier to set up and manage monitoring your services. No more need to specify a payload and an expected response.
Refreshed status pages
November 11th, 2024 Status pages design has been slightly refreshed to provide a better look and feel. This also includes a few bug fixes and improve how incidents and downtime is presented to your users in a more coherent way.
Incident management enhancements
November 8th, 2024 Several improvements have been introduced to the incident management system to streamline incident creation and give you more control:Manual incident resolution
You can now manually resolve incidents, providing greater control over the incident lifecycle and ensuring accurate status reporting.
Publish status update during incident creation
When creating a new incident, you can now publish a status update immediately, keeping your users informed from the very beginning.
Control on incident downtime calculation
You now have the ability to exclude an incident from the downtime calculation, allowing you to maintain accurate uptime metrics and avoid skewing your performance data. This feature is particularly useful for maintenance windows with downtime that are already part of your SLA, or for incidents that have minimal impact on your users.
Incident creation
October 7th, 2024 Incidents can now be created manually, this feature allows you to easily track and manage incidents that are not automatically detected by uptime monitoring checks. It is now also possible to modify incident created automatically by the platform, allowing you to customize incident titles shown on your status page, and add more details to the incident report. Manually created incident uses alert policies under the hood, and are not automatically resolved when associated monitors are successful. We hope that you will be able to better communicate with your users during incidents with this new feature.
Phare for good
August 30th, 2024 We are thrilled to announce the “Phare for Good” initiative, offering an extended free plan to open source projects and nonprofit organizations. This is our way of supporting those who are making a positive impact by providing our full suite of monitoring and incident management tools, completely free. If you’re driving change through technology or social causes, we’re here to help keep your online presence strong and reliable. Join the program here: https://phare.io/for-good
Blog
August 22th, 2024 We’ve had some exciting knowledge to share recently, so we’ve decided to launch an official blog for Phare. We’ll post new content occasionally, but only when we have something valuable to share. You can already read a few articles:- Downsampling time series data
- How we run Ghost on Docker with subdirectory routing
- Best practices to configure an uptime monitoring service
Phare platform makeover
August 5th, 2024 The Phare platform received a makeover focused on improving the navigation and user experience. The new design provides a cleaner and more intuitive interface, making it easier to access the features you need. Most pages have been updated with many small improvements to improve the overall user experience. Your monitoring pages have also been redesigned slightly and given a new filter to show performance data specific to a region. This allows you to quickly identify any regional performance issues and take appropriate action.
Improved monitoring performance chart
July 29th, 2024 The algorithm used to generate the performance chart has been improved to provide a more accurate representation of your monitor’s performance. This change allows for better anomaly removal and a more precise representation of the overall performance showed by your monitor. Incidents are now displayed on the chart with their respective impact color, making it easier to understand any correlation at a glance. If you’re interested in learning more about how we generate the performance chart, you can read our article on downsampling time series data.
Custom domains for status pages
July 22th, 2024 You can now use your own domain for your status pages, providing a more seamless and branded experience for your users. This feature allows you to create a custom subdomain for your status pages, such asstatus.example.com, and link it to your Phare status page.
The Phare-provided subdomain *.status.phare.io attached to your status page will stay active and will automatically redirect users to your custom domain if you configure one.
Instructions on how to set up a custom domain for your status page can be found in the documentation.
Outgoing webhooks integration
July 17th, 2024 Outgoing webhooks are now available Phare platform, allowing you to connect with third-party tools or build your own integration. The webhook payload can be customized for each alert rule event that you would like to use. You are free to use any valid JSON structure with access to many variables to help you build the perfect payload for your use case.
Billing quotas estimation
July 11th, 2024 Billing quotas forecasting has been released on the Phare platform. This new feature provides greater visibility into your billing quota usage, helping you manage your resources more effectively. On your organization billing page, you can now see detailed forecasts of your quota usage. This includes predictions based on your current usage patterns, allowing you to plan ahead and avoid service interruptions.
New API endpoints: alert rules, incidents and status pages
July 7th, 2024 New API endpoints are available to help you programmatically interact with the Phare platform: These new API endpoints enhance your ability to automate and streamline your monitoring, alerting, and incident management workflows, offering a more integrated and efficient approach to maintaining service reliability. This release ends the current phase of API development with all major entities now available, allowing us to focus on stability to plan the end of the beta phase.
Monitoring timeout customization
July 4th, 2024 You can now customize the timeout duration for your monitors, offering greater control over your monitoring strategy for more accurate and reliable results. This new feature allows you to set specific timeout values, taking into account DNS resolution, connection time, response time, and any redirections. By adjusting these settings, you can fine-tune the sensitivity of your checks to better meet your specific needs. While the default timeout value of 7 seconds is optimized for most scenarios, providing a good balance and minimizing false positives, you now have the flexibility to modify this setting to better suit your unique requirements.
Smart monitoring suggestion
July 3rd, 2024 We are introducing smart monitoring suggestions, designed to help you effortlessly optimize your monitors. This new feature provides tailored recommendations to enhance the accuracy and reliability of your monitoring. Smart Suggestions will alert you of unnecessary redirects, which can slow down your site’s reported performance, and recommend using multiple regions for monitoring if you currently use only a single region. By following these suggestions, you can ensure more comprehensive coverage and faster detection of potential issues.
30 second monitoring interval
July 2nd, 2024 Phare enters the realm of sub-minute monitoring with the introduction of a new 30-second monitoring interval for your monitors. With this update, you can detect and respond to issues faster than ever, ensuring that your services remain reliable with minimal downtime. The 30-second checks are available to all users, offering a higher level of detail and control over your monitoring strategy.
New changelog
July 1st, 2024 Phare’s changelog has been moved on our documentation site to harmonize the way that we write content on new Phare features. All previous entries where migrated to this page. We hope this new format will allow us to publish new entries faster and with a higher frequency.New monitoring regions
May 28th, 2024 Following our recent monitoring infrastructure migration, three new regions are released for uptime monitoring: Say hello to Japan, the United Kingdom and Mexico.
New monitoring infrastructure
May 26th, 2024 Our monitoring infrastructure is the biggest operating cost and most important piece of the Phare Uptime product. As we perform millions of monitoring checks from many regions around the world, this infrastructure should be scalable, efficient and more importantly reliable. As we grew over the past few months, our previous solution based on AWS Lambda started to show its limit in terms of performance and cost, forcing us to look for an alternative solution. Today we migrated all monitoring checks to a newly written infrastructure based on Cloudflare workers. This solution allows us to maintain our generous free plan and a competitive price for our paid customers.Alert policies API
May 24th, 2024 API endpoints to manage alert policies have been released and documented.
REST API
May 20th, 2024 The Phare REST API has been released with associated documentation. All endpoints required to manage monitors are already available, other endpoints will be added in the next few weeks until all the action you can perform in your dashboard can also be done programmatically. You will need to generate an API key to authenticate your organization, you are able to choose an access scope (Read / Write) for each Phare product as well as access to the resources of the Phare platform. More informations are available on the API documentation page.New Documentation
May 15th, 2024 Documentation has been moved to docs.phare.io and offers an improved user experience. The documentation source code has also been published to GitHub, allowing anyone to contribute.
Incident comment and update alert
May 7th, 2024 Two new alert rules have been created to let you know when your team is working on resolving an incident. The first one will alert you everytime a new comment is published on an incident timeline, and the second when a team member publishes a status update for the incident.