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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

#31

Post by peterwwillis »

patio11 wrote: post #21
peterwwillis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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. 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 some…

Yes, I understand the concept. But it's actually so open-ended that you get woken up in the middle of the night if something doesn't go right, not everything.

If you have intermittent packet loss on your internet connection you get constant alerts about your backups not working, even though it's just the internet that's wonky. Or if this service isn't set up robustly enough, you miss your alerts when they go down. Either way you get no context about the failure, just obscure panic in the middle of the night. On top of that an attacker can enumerate the URLs (or find it via some other means) and send false requests while they take down your service without you noticing, or the opposite effect with a DDoS on the provider.

I'm not saying it's not a useful service. I'm sure plenty of people would rather pay for this thing and have some peace of mind rather than nothing (because most of these users probably aren't technical enough to do something identical in Google App Engine or a VPS). I just have high expectations for solutions that you have to pay for.

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

#32

Post by frossie »

ralfn wrote: post #27
struppi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thousand…

>You do realize that 600 dollars a year is next to nothing for a business? 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 t…

>But at that price point, there are similar solutions available with much more coverage and features.

Exactly. I sit on a quarter-million dollar budget for hardware and services, but I still have a value-for-money filter, and this doesn't pass it. I might as well use this:

https://github.com/grahambell/crab

for free, or pay for a monitoring solution that is higher reliability, is inside my network, and doesn't charge me per cronjob. Even at the bulk plan, half a cent for a single cron job to send a single daily http request and only alert the one guy who has an iPhone seems... unreasonable. It doesn't scale for me.

By way of comparison, for that price I can get 20 private repos on Github, which consume oodles of space and networking resources.

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

#34

Post by Sanddancer »

patio11 wrote: post #21
peterwwillis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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. 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 some…

The problem with that setup is that you get alerts that will get lost in the noise. Systems like Nagios, I can set up dependencies, so that I won't get a flood of alerts when the network goes down, or set up maintenance windows so that when I am working on a system, I won't get spurious alerts. Also, self-hosted tools like nagios mean that I can hook it up to send an SMS or use a backup connection, or run a script that triggers an arduino-controlled bat signal to alert me. None of this is really possible with DMS

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

#35

Post by sedev »

Sanddancer wrote: post #34
patio11 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. 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 some…

The problem with that setup is that you get alerts that will get lost in the noise. Systems like Nagios, I can set up dependencies, so that I won't get a flood of alerts when the network goes down, or set up maintenance windows so that when I am working on a system, I won't get spurious alerts. Also, self-hosted tools like nagios mean that I can hook it up to send an SMS or use a backup connection, or run a script th…

That's only an argument that there are some cases where DMS is inappropriate, not that it's inappropriate for all cases. Considering that in general, setting up a robust Nagios install, configuring it, and maintaining it, costs far more than DMS, there are many scenarios where DMS is the rational choice.

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

#36

Post by nimblegorilla »

patio11 wrote: post #21
peterwwillis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

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. 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 some…

The biggest problem I see with this service is that exit code 0 does not guarantee the process successfully did what was intended (only that the process ended without errors). This solution seems to leave too many holes for false positives and false negatives to sneak through. When paying for services like this I want it to be bullet-proof rather than bullet-resistant.

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

#37

Post by nikatwork »

jameskilton wrote: post #14
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 i…

I would ignore the feedback around pricing. Anyone who beefs over $600 and thinks they "won't need support" is not worth having as a customer. $600 is fine for SMB and wouldn't even register for enterprise.
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