Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

Critically importantly for this use case, if you are doing something critical for your business (say, backups or your daily billing run or sending reminders to thousands of people or what have you) and something goes wrong with your network and makes you unable to curl, you get told about that. If you instead do self-hosted email, and your network fails, you don't get told about that.

It's fail-open vs. fail-close. That's literally so core to the product it is alluded to in the name. A Dead Man's Switch doesn't go off if anything goes wrong, it goes off if everything doesn't go right.

I actually don't want another app for reporting. I already use a monitoring service (pingdom) and would prefer to keep all of our "alerts" organized through a single service.

Could you offer a http-based public status page? Our system allowed each snitch to be tagged with a tag like "net.tourbuzz.db.replication.upToDate" and then a url like http://foo.com/deadoralive?filter=net.tourbuzz would allow us to use a single Pingdom monitor to alert us if any of snitches in that namespace failed.

This is a simple tagging structure that makes it easy to organize large numbers of snitches into manageable groups and easily integrate it into existing monitoring/alerting infrastructure.

Feel free to email me directly if you want more info.

I get that. But at that price point, there are similar solutions available with much more coverage and features. This isn't actually competing with DataDog, Munin, Nagios, New Relic on features or reliability.

>? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses.

If thats the bussiness risk you are taking, you shouldn't be depending on just a ping after a cron job! Phooff. You do realize this thing is essentially only measuring if the cron job has executed. Not if it is succesfull. Sure you can script the success/failure state. But how are you going to test that against a myrid of potential failure states? What does the proccess return when the OOMKILLER gets its? Do you know?

The only reason to use something that 'just does pings' is because it's not important enough, and you don't want to invest that much time and effort. Those other tools require to be a integral part of your setup, but they'll give you much better monitoring capabilities and actual ease of mind. More importantly, rather than warning you when things have gone wrong (after the fact), they'll warn you in advance things are not looking good. They'll monitor the actual proccess, not if they were launched every hour, but what they were up to.

This product is in a very interesting niche because it seems to target projects-not-important-enough-i-wouldnt-bother-but-if-its-this-easy-why-not. But it is not priced accordingly.

>Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now.

Those projects where you don't need them for: those are only ones where a product like this makes sense. If there are lots of dollars on the line, i strongly suggest you use actual industrial-grade monitoring solutions, not a ping after a cron job.

It does a lot of stuff, but I have it email me every Thursday to remind me to take the trash to the curb. Its just an email, not a calendar alert, but it keeps the clutter off the calendar and I usually see an email within a couple hours anyway.