Semonto's 2022 wrap-up

Time flies, it’s already 2023. Time to look back at 2022 and all the things that happened at Semonto.

First a quick recap of how we did end 2021: Late 2021, we released our Android application, and we added two features: We added a search bar that searches deeply in Semonto, so you can easily navigate and find back your website monitor, status page or notification settings. Notification groups can also be marked as default alert settings, so any new monitor will be linked to those settings and ensure you are alerted when your website goes down.

Before diving into what happened in 2022, thank you for your feedback and suggestions. We really love feedback, and evaluate all suggestions.

Notifications

We made quite some changes to the notification options of Semonto.

Firstly, you can now define how you want to be notified for each monitoring feature of Semonto. For example, you can get technical issues like website reachability issues or the TLS certificate to your IT department and get notifications about broken links and mixed content in the inbox of your content manager. More info at our announcement blog article.

Secondly, we added Slack notifications. You can quickly inform your team of issues via Slack without adding noise to email inboxes.

Thirdly, we added test buttons so that you can quickly test your notification settings, and verify if the Slack integration or voice messages are working.

Lastly, and most major improvement, just released before Christmas: Allowed Downtime. Semonto sends an alert as soon as we detect issues with your websites. We always verify the issue from multiple locations to avoid false positives. Some incidents can be short living, for example, a proxy server that is restarting making your website shortly unavailable. Semonto will still detect such issues and be visible in our uptime reports. However, you can now configure only to be notified if an incident is happening for more than a given period of time. Avoiding notifications for short incidents and flooding your inbox.

This also allows you to set an escalation system: If an issue happens for 5 minutes, email the first line of developers. If the issue is happening for more than 1 hour, notify the lead engineers. For incidents running more than 2 hours, notify the CTO, for example. All possible out of the box with Semonto now.

PDF Report

Another exciting feature introduced in 2022: Performance reports in PDF format. You can now generate a PDF report containing a history of the performance of your website over a given period. Including the reachability and uptime data, but also an overview of all broken links, mixed content and more. Ready to share with your customers. More info at the feature page of performance reports.

Redesign, broken links and more

We are sure you noticed, but we did release a rehaul of the interface of Semonto. We hope you like it and find it more user-friendly and easier to use Semonto. As said, all feedback is welcome!

We also added a timeline of the history of the broken links and mixed content tests. This helps to check if the number of broken links or occurrences of mixed content decreases to zero and under control.

Use cases

We also wrote quite some blog articles on our blog with use cases and best practices. Quick overview:

• HTTPS and TLS/SSL Monitoring Explained
• Broken Links on Your Website - How to Prevent, Find and Fix Them
• 4 Content Monitoring Hacks to Save Time
• 4 more content monitoring hacks in Semonto
• Why you should care about your website’s uptime
• What is web hosting, and why should I care?
• What is the cost of downtime?
• 9 ways to prepare your website for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• An extra layer of security with HTTP response headers
• And lastly, we asked ChatGPT why website monitoring matters. Check ChatGPT answer.

Up to 2023...

As you can read, 2022 was a pretty big year. 2023 won't be different. Today, we did release a redesign of our broken links and mixed content. More info later about this. Feel free to check it out already!

As said, we do love feedback, so if you have more feedback, please get in touch

PS: You can subscribe to our newsletter to be the first to learn about more releases.

PS2: Need to monitor your website? Feel free to sign up for the free trial of Semonto, get started with a few clicks, and be informed instantly on your website health status.