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Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

deadmanssnitch.com

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Re: Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

#11

Post by struppi »

ralfn wrote: post #8

Nice branding. Most monitoring tools are overly complicated, both in their features as well the use-cases they try to cover. I like the clear focus of this; the product itself doesn't require one to invest a lot of time, which is a good thing. Just some questions: - how do you prevent unauthorized snitches from screwing with your data? Wouldn't it be wise to limit a snitch to a certain server ip? - why only an iOS ap…

You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to nothing for a business? I don't even run a business, I am just a freelancer, but I'd happily pay 600 USD/year for this service if I needed it.

The price doesn't make a real dent in any serious budget, so why bother? And 600 dollars is really cheap compared to anything that could happen when you miss an important event. Email campaign not sent? This could cost thousands of dollars or more. Backup not done? Could be millions of dollars for some kinds of businesses.

I think the service is priced reasonably. If you think otherwise, start a competitor. If you can convince me that your service will reliably mail me on incidents no matter what catastrophe happens to your data center, I might use it over theirs (Should I ever need such a service. As I said before, I don't need it right now.).

Re: Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

#13

Post by mpclark »

As an aside, does anyone make a cron panel for humans? I'd find that really useful as I'm usually so busy being distracted by the next big thing that I forget to take care of repetitive tasks.

I know I can achieve something like that with my Google Calendar but I don't like the way repeating events fill it up -- it would be better if they just showed for the next occurrence.

Re: Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

#14

Post by jameskilton »

ralfn wrote: post #8

Nice branding. Most monitoring tools are overly complicated, both in their features as well the use-cases they try to cover. I like the clear focus of this; the product itself doesn't require one to invest a lot of time, which is a good thing. Just some questions: - how do you prevent unauthorized snitches from screwing with your data? Wouldn't it be wise to limit a snitch to a certain server ip? - why only an iOS ap…

One of the developers here. Glad you liked the branding! As you've mentioned, our goal is to stay stupidly simple to use. We want users to forget we're even here, until something isn't working. Now as for your questions:

> - how do you prevent unauthorized snitches from screwing with your data?

We don't currently have such protections in place basically because it hasn't been necessary. We keep an eye on things and if we start to see such traffic we'll investigate what should be done at that time.

> - why only an iOS app? This excludes lots of potential customers (including me).

Time and customer requests. We've started looking into building an Android app and glanced at Windows Phone as well. That said, mobile apps aren't required to use DMS, the default is to send emails.

> - why not offer an API, so we can securely fetch the status of our snitches?

We have actually just started rolling out a new API! If you're interested in helping us beta test this, get a hold of us at hi@deadmanssnitch.com.

As for pricing, plans are built around the peace-of-mind our product offers customers. Our canonical example is an ops engineer needing a backup only to find out that backups haven't worked for the past weeks/months/etc. At that point the cost of DMS is a pittance to what the lack of backups just cost the company in question.

Re: Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

#15

Post by jameskilton »

samcrawford wrote: post #5

Small gripe, based upon prior painful experience... you should always set a timeout on curl requests (or any others for that matter). There's not one by default! It's -m in the curl command line client.

Good point, we'll make a note to include this in our documentation!

Re: Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

#16

Post by jameskilton »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #10

So instead of MAILTO=sendmail I use MAILTO= http://deadmandssnitch/report or similar?

Actually something like:

0 6 * * * /bin/sh my_cron_job.sh && curl https://nosnch.in/abc123

Then, when my_cron_job.sh fails (non-0 exit status), no snitch is triggered. DMS notices this hole and notifies you that the job did not run.

Re: Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

#17

Post by jameskilton »

ralfn wrote: post #9
bowlofpetunias wrote: post #7

Been using DMS for over quite a while now. It is an absolute must-have for anybody depending on scheduled tasks, and I haven't found anything like it. And it's so cheap that there is no reason not to do it. My only gripe is that I can only get alerted via email, which is the most often overlooked channel. I've hooked those emails up to HipChat, but some direct options for services like HipChat, Pagerduty etcetera wou…

Doesn't it do push notifications on iOS?

Yes, the iOS app has full push notification support! To suggest other integration points, please contact us at hi@deadmanssnitch.com.

Re: Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

#18

Post by peterwwillis »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #10

So instead of MAILTO=sendmail I use MAILTO= http://deadmandssnitch/report or similar?

That would actually be more stable, since it would rely on a network designed for fault-tolerant redundant store-and-forward messaging.

Instead, each cron job runs an HTTP GET, and later you can view the service's website to see the tests that have requested successfully or haven't responded at all. Unfortunately for your system, if there's a network hiccup, you won't know why your jobs failed and the job will hang on the HTTP call. Also, you're paying for it instead of just sending e-mail alerts to yourself.

Re: Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

#19

Post by peterwwillis »

bowlofpetunias wrote: post #6
mrmondo wrote: post #4

Looks very interesting, but unless I can host it myself it's a no-go for me.

Uhm, the whole point of services like these is that they are external and not tied into your own hosting. Also, it knows absolutely nothing about your services and doesn't require any level of access. All you do is ping it.

It requires internet-level access. So internal hosts that shouldn't have internet access (like a backup machine, where all your most critical data is stored) might not be able to reach it.

Re: Dead Man's Snitch – Monitoring for Scheduled Tasks

#20

Post by icebraining »

mpclark wrote: post #13

As an aside, does anyone make a cron panel for humans? I'd find that really useful as I'm usually so busy being distracted by the next big thing that I forget to take care of repetitive tasks. I know I can achieve something like that with my Google Calendar but I don't like the way repeating events fill it up -- it would be better if they just showed for the next occurrence.

Why not make a second calendar in GC, put the repeating events there (with notifications enabled), then hide it from the main view?
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