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Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

deadmanssnitch.com

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Re: Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

#11

Post by eli »

wrath wrote: post #7
barnaba wrote: post #2

$19/month for more than one task? That's fine for companies, but I'm not going to pay that much as an individual, who needs 3, maybe 5 tasks to track.

Agreed. I don't think my company would use this at the moment until it's proven service that has a good track record and a SLA (what's your up-time guarantee?). That said, I'd use it for my personal projects but not for $19/month. I'd pay about $1/month per monitor.

I get what you're saying, but I think you're being overly skeptical. If you've already got a system for monitoring tasks in place, there's no reason you couldn't run both. And if you don't have a system in place, then if it fails you'll be no worse off than having never signed up.

I think most SLAs for these types of services are mostly pointless anyway. If something important to your business goes down, are you really going to be worried about whether or not you have to pay the $19?

Re: Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

#12

Post by r38y »

wrath wrote: post #7
barnaba wrote: post #2

$19/month for more than one task? That's fine for companies, but I'm not going to pay that much as an individual, who needs 3, maybe 5 tasks to track.

Agreed. I don't think my company would use this at the moment until it's proven service that has a good track record and a SLA (what's your up-time guarantee?). That said, I'd use it for my personal projects but not for $19/month. I'd pay about $1/month per monitor.

RE: SLA... the use case is more "I want to know sooner than later that something didn't happen" than "Something didn't happen this minute, I want to know NOW!". If and when we go down, your task won't be able to check in and we'll end up sending you a false "positive" which is better than not knowing at all when something fails.

Re: Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

#13

Post by r38y »

barnaba wrote: post #2

$19/month for more than one task? That's fine for companies, but I'm not going to pay that much as an individual, who needs 3, maybe 5 tasks to track.

The pricing is more based on value. It is the price my clients said they would be more than willing to pay to never have to panic again when there is some EC2 problem and the backups stopped working weeks ago.

This actually happened over the weekend:

https://twitter.com/tikaro/status/250286735064436736

Re: Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

#14

Post by barnaba »

r38y wrote: post #13
barnaba wrote: post #2

$19/month for more than one task? That's fine for companies, but I'm not going to pay that much as an individual, who needs 3, maybe 5 tasks to track.

The pricing is more based on value. It is the price my clients said they would be more than willing to pay to never have to panic again when there is some EC2 problem and the backups stopped working weeks ago. This actually happened over the weekend: https://twitter.com/tikaro/status/250286735064436736

I understand that. It's just not that valuable for my personal projects.

I'd go further and say, that most of people willing to pay that much (serious about their backups and availability) already have some solution in place.

The service is very appealing for people, who don't really care that much (because it's very easy to use). I'm afraid that those people won't pay $19/mo.

Re: Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

#15

Post by r38y »

guylhem wrote: post #9

To those complaining about the price - the level of technicality, like for MAILTO=user@domain.com in a crontab may not explain the price alone. Price != costs. The right price is the price your target consumers are willing to pay. And if like another commenter you are doing to build it yourself instead of forking $19, you obviously are not the consumer. (and neither am I - I'll stick to cron :-) !)

Thank's for pointing out that price != cost. The value of the service is in not having to ever panic again when checking the backups during an emergency.

It is very easy to be notified when something happens (for example, MAILTO in cron) but it's hard to know when something DOESN'T happen, especially if you work on a lot of sites.

There are plenty of ways to be notified when something doesn't happen if you are willing to use a little elbow grease... we use one of them to make sure DMS itself is working properly.

Re: Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

#16

Post by ericd »

r38y wrote: post #12
wrath wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I don't think my company would use this at the moment until it's proven service that has a good track record and a SLA (what's your up-time guarantee?). That said, I'd use it for my personal projects but not for $19/month. I'd pay about $1/month per monitor.

RE: SLA... the use case is more "I want to know sooner than later that something didn't happen" than "Something didn't happen this minute, I want to know NOW!". If and when we go down, your task won't be able to check in and we'll end up sending you a false "positive" which is better than not knowing at all when something fails.

Actually, false positives with alarms are really, really bad - I will start to ignore them very quickly if they're not reliable indicators of an actual problem.

EDIT: If you have reasonable default tolerances or the ability to set tolerances on tasks, I'm pretty interested in trying it out - do you integrate or have plans to integrate with pagerduty, or do you simply fire off an email?

Re: Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

#17

Post by StavrosK »

r38y wrote: post #15
guylhem wrote: post #9

To those complaining about the price - the level of technicality, like for MAILTO=user@domain.com in a crontab may not explain the price alone. Price != costs. The right price is the price your target consumers are willing to pay. And if like another commenter you are doing to build it yourself instead of forking $19, you obviously are not the consumer. (and neither am I - I'll stick to cron :-) !)

Thank's for pointing out that price != cost. The value of the service is in not having to ever panic again when checking the backups during an emergency. It is very easy to be notified when something happens (for example, MAILTO in cron) but it's hard to know when something DOESN'T happen, especially if you work on a lot of sites. There are plenty of ways to be notified when something doesn't happen if you are willin…

As the creator and owner of deadmansswitch.net, I hate you :P

Re: Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

#18

Post by scottyallen »

guylhem wrote: post #9

To those complaining about the price - the level of technicality, like for MAILTO=user@domain.com in a crontab may not explain the price alone. Price != costs. The right price is the price your target consumers are willing to pay. And if like another commenter you are doing to build it yourself instead of forking $19, you obviously are not the consumer. (and neither am I - I'll stick to cron :-) !)

I run a business(appmonsta.com) that relies heavily on a whole bunch of various periodic processes running when they should. I'd easily pay $19 to worry less at night about whether everything ran like it should have. I'm not sure whether Dead Man's Snitch would alleviate my worry, but the pain strong enough to justify the price point for me.

What I will say is that I probably would want to be able to set up 3-5 snitches before I'd feel comfortable committing to setting a bunch more up, which incidentally, is also the point I'd be willing to start paying money.

Re: Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

#19

Post by metaobject »

r38y wrote: post #8
metaobject wrote: post #3

And what service do I use to find out when this service doesn't run?

What are you currently using to make sure your periodic tasks run? As far as making sure DMS runs, we use another third-party to make sure our checkers run. Contact support if you are interested in finding out more.

We have an elaborate system that someone cooked up a while ago that involves a tree of communicating Processes running on different machines that monitor our real time services. If we could consolidate our 'checker' processes into one that may be the right thing to do. Can the system be set up to use authentication to get behind firewalls or do hue things being monitored have to be accessible over the public Internet?

Re: Get notified when a periodic task doesn't run

#20

Post by cheap »

I'm sure this will make tons of money and will be amazingly useful as a hip tool for those developers we all know. But honestly the rest of us build this kind of stuff into our company dashboards without thinking twice. Where it belongs, in the hands of an internal team who can share the monitoring of more than $20 worth of "snitches".
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