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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

#31

Post by cheap »

alexknowshtml wrote: post #25
cheap wrote: post #20

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".

Relevant username.

If supporting, contributing and deploying to open source software makes me cheap than so be it. I'm ecstatic at the chance to share that technology with my clients and to help them give it back where applicable.

I hope your endeavors continue to make you happy with your means as they do mine.

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

#32

Post by cheap »

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…

I know a lot of designers that will love and support this product.

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

#33

Post by r38y »

StavrosK wrote: post #17
r38y wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Haha, sorry. Maybe you shouldn't squat on domains? :P

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

#34

Post by gm »

cheap wrote: post #24
barnaba wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I charged my clients $19.99 a month for something like this they'd laugh at me and hire someone else.

Then you have the clients no one else wants (maybe that's why you have that username?). You can keep them.

Smart people go after customers willing to pay more.

Actually, I have some old cheap clients I fired some time ago... Should I send them your way? They need someone to yell at and then laugh at when the cost of their needs are quoted.

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

#36

Post by Cherian »

I run this as a combination of monit timestamp checking and stdout to a file. Is there anything this does that I cannot do this without monit?

e.g.

MAILTO=email@ops.com

1 23 * * * /home/cron/backup.sh 1> /backups/backup

and monit doing a

check file backup with path /backups/backup

if timestamp > 24 hours then alert

This way I am emailed when there is an error with the backup script, otherwise things continue as it is.

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

#37

Post by alxndr »

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…

I've used one-line cron scripts that capture output of a command, check it, and if it doesn't look like what it should, sends me an email.

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

#38

Post by gm »

Here's a shot at giving constructive feedback rather than bitching about the cost which most people here are doing. Point taken, there's the other stuff I can think of:

1) Disclose cost earlier. Telling people to sign up for free and then asking them to pay you is not cool. It starts off the relationship on a bad note and will prevent people from signing up.

2) You have a great idea here. Startups need this. We do not have time to set up and configure nagios, or some other warning mechanism. You make a good start by attacking the problem no one else actually wants to take care of, and making it really easy to do so.

3) Either forget the hobbyist or make another (less expensive) level of service for him. Do not forget there is very little money to be made on hobbyists unless it is very easy for you to take them on. You do not want to take on these people asking for the same service for $1 unless you can make it much cheaper to provide service to them.

4) As some have noted: Put in a SLA, and tell us why your service will not fail. Otherwise if we are not warned we will not know if it's because your service is down.

5) Put up a tutorial or more info on what you offer. Can we have planned maintenances (ie, do not warn me about this for 4 hours)? Can we hit the snooze button? What are the methods you use for notifications? How many people/emails/phones will be notified per failure? The unanswered questions go on and on.

6) Do more stuff. What about other type of monitoring? Can we group servers into groups so we do not have to set up each individually? Can we monitor stuff that IS running but I send you a value periodically through the HTTP hit? I want to graph stuff, like HTTP hits per hour, or HTTPD errors per minute. I want a warning to be sent to me when I get more than X HTTPD errors per minute, for example.

EDIT: 7) Add a trial period, this just makes sense.

So for work I run Nagios. I would love to have a Nagios set up for my side projects because Nagios provides a world of benefits but if I invested my time in setting up Nagios then I would not have time to do actual development.

You are onto something good, you just need to shape it a bit.

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

#40

Post by r38y »

gm wrote: post #30
omni wrote: post #6

I really shouldn't have to create an account just to figure out what your pricing looks like.

^^^ this. Plus you say "Sign up for free" in the home page. At the very least it's misleading.

I'm not sure how it's misleading. You can sign up and have one snitch for free. It would be misleading if I said sign up for free and then didn't allow you to create ANY snitches without paying.
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