PRODUCT CHANGELOG
What’s new for you.
The features and fixes that change how you use HowlOps, in plain language, release by release. For the longer stories behind each release, see What’s New.
v1.16
JUN 27, 2026
NEW
- Schedules now come in two types. "Rotation" is the automatic on-call rotation you already know; "Signup" is a planning calendar where people claim the slots they want to cover and mark when they're unavailable — so on-call reflects who actually signed up. Paging, escalation and the cover board work the same on both.
- Postmortems open ready-written: we pre-fill the writeup from the incident itself (summary, severity, time-to-resolve, affected monitors, timeline and links to the screenshot / debug log), so you start ~80% done and just add root cause and lessons. Mark timeline entries as Detection, Diagnosis or Repair and they flow into a "Key evidence" section automatically.
IMPROVED
- Network Diagnostics (ping / traceroute / MTR) can now be switched on or off per workspace from admin.
- Hitting a rate limit now shows a clear "too many requests, wait a few seconds" message with the retry delay, instead of a generic failure.
FIXES
- Billing now counts your included SMS and voice allotment correctly on On-call plans, so messages within your allowance are no longer charged as overage.
- First-run onboarding is fixed: new free accounts can create their first monitor and finish setup without getting stuck or looping back to the wizard.
- Public status pages now show incident history reliably (a linked-monitor incident could previously abort the history load).
v1.14
JUN 26, 2026
NEW
- Services: a new catalog that groups the monitors behind each business service with its owning team, escalation policy and runbook. See each service's live status at a glance, and open one to see its blast radius — which monitors depend on it and which services are at risk if it goes down. Learn more →
- On-call cover board: release a shift you can't take to the whole team, and any teammate can claim it. Claiming instantly creates a covering override, so coverage is never left to chance — and everyone gets notified when a shift opens up or yours is covered.
- Follow-ups: a sidebar page that gathers every open action item across all your incident postmortems — filter by status, owner, due date and priority, jump to the incident, and tick items done inline.
- Each notification channel can now choose which events it receives (incident opened, resolved, acknowledged, assigned, silenced, maintenance) — so you can route noisy recoveries to one channel and keep your pager for incidents only.
FIXES
- Native Alertmanager (Prometheus) and incoming integration alerts now create and deliver incidents reliably — previously some were accepted but silently never delivered.
- External alerts and missed heartbeats now respect quiet hours the same way monitor alerts do (non-critical suppressed in the window; critical always pages).
v1.10
JUN 26, 2026
NEW
- Failure screenshots are now opt-in per monitor (paid Uptime plans): turn on "Capture screenshots on failure" and we'll grab one automatically when a monitor goes down, plus let you capture one by hand from any incident. Off by default.
v1.9.1
JUN 25, 2026
NEW
- Network Diagnostics: run ping, traceroute or MTR against any host from the sidebar to debug your monitor targets.
- Maintenance windows are now available on every plan (Free included) — schedule planned work so it doesn't page you.
IMPROVED
- Plan limits are now consistent everywhere — what the pricing page promises is exactly what the app enforces (monitors, check interval, retention, status pages, regions, escalation steps).
- Alert and incident detail now shows the right evidence per type: HTTP alerts get a screenshot plus the prober debug log, ping alerts get round-trip stats, heartbeat alerts are titled by the heartbeat that missed, and integration alerts show their labels.
v1.9.0
JUN 23, 2026
NEW
- Major platform redesign — refreshed status pages (Classic, Compact, Spotlight and Orbit layouts) with a live-preview editor, a distinct Alert detail separate from Incidents, a redesigned Incidents section with a severity model and war room, standalone Settings pages, and a new organisation + team switcher.
- Alerts and Incidents are now two layers: Alerts is the firehose of raw signals; Incidents is the curated list of problems you've declared. Alerts get their own detail view (priority, occurrences, first/last seen, full payload), and a default rule promotes everything critical to an incident.
- Teams: organise people into teams with team-local roles, scope on-call to a team with the sidebar switcher, and control team visibility (org-wide, linked teams, or private).
- Passwordless login with passkeys, OIDC single sign-on, and SCIM 2.0 user provisioning.
- Self-service billing: pause / resume your subscription, redeem promo codes, and a standalone Usage page showing live usage against every limit in your plan.
v1.7.0
JUN 19, 2026
NEW
- Native Prometheus / Alertmanager alerts: point Alertmanager straight at HowlOps with a token. Incoming alerts keep their full payload (priority, tags, labels), are deduplicated and auto-resolved, and route to your escalation policies — and routing rules can match on labels (e.g. send everything with team=payments to a specific policy).
v1.6.0
JUN 18, 2026
NEW
- Customer testimonials: invite a customer to share a few words from inside the app, with their chosen credit (full name, first name, or anonymous). Nothing is published without explicit consent and our review.
FIXES
- Editing a status page now updates the public page instantly instead of taking up to 90 seconds.
- Telegram alert buttons work again — Acknowledge / Resolve / Silence now act on the incident correctly.
v1.5.0
JUN 15, 2026
FEATURES
- Your personal notification chain now escalates automatically: if you don't answer the first channel within its fallback window, HowlOps moves to the next (push → email → SMS → voice) until you acknowledge. It stops the moment the incident is acknowledged, silenced, or resolved. Learn more →
- Voice (phone call) paging and PagerDuty are now available as notification channels, configurable from admin settings — no redeploy needed.
IMPROVED
- On-call schedules show a hand-off summary (who holds the pager now, who's up next, and when the rotation turns over), with a push reminder before each hand-off. Temporary schedules let you cover a holiday or war room for a fixed window without touching the rotation.
- Notification preferences (the event-by-channel grid) now save and take effect, including a Push column — push and email are on by default for the incident lifecycle, and recoveries never spend an SMS or voice call.
FIXES
- Escalation now reliably pages on-call, and recovery notifications follow the same path as the alert (back to whoever was paged) instead of broadcasting to every channel.
LAST UPDATED JUN 29, 2026