Growing a cron job monitoring side project into a real business | Hacker News Reader

Growing a cron job monitoring side project into a real business

indiehackers.com

160 pointscsallen27 comments

I've been using Cronitor since spring of 2014 and it's been great. I initially used it to monitor the uptime of the real-time location feed from my local transit agency (so I could email them to fix it). It was pretty remarkable being able to setup monitoring in ~5 minutes with a single line of code. Now I use it for tons of daemons and cron jobs, it's pretty great to actually have them monitored (not to mention the super simple duration tracking).

Once, it appeared that I was getting false-positive alerts so I called the phone number (not really knowing what to expect) and when (Shane I think?) picked up on the first call I was just flabbergasted that someone was available almost immediately to explain my monitor's behavior. (I had conflated the /run ping with the /complete ping). I highly recommend the service based on their support and my good experience with their API.

As a customer I can highly, highly recommend Cronitor.

The service is continually improving and the customer support has been second-to-none, they have gone above and beyond to meet my needs.

Thanks for the kind words! That just made my day!

I used to use Cronitor but switched to the free (as in beer and speech) https://healthchecks.io

Looks good.

>100 log entries per check

Do you know what that means? (On the pricing page)

Maintainer here! For each monitored job healthchecks.io keeps a historic log of received pings. Each log entry has time, source IP and HTTP User-Agent header. These are useful to answer questions like:

* are my pings always right on time? What's the time variance?

* what IPs am I receiving pings from?

* who's pinging me -- a wget or curl utility, somebody using a browser, or some HTTP library?

The number "100" means that for each monitored job, the service will keep 100 most recent log entries, and will prune older entries.

Ah okay. That sounds like healthchecks.io is a perfectly usable service even on the free tier. I'll have to look into it soon.

This service has a very nice and honest "about" page: https://healthchecks.io/about/

"The ops team consists of a single person, so multi-hour or even multi-day outages are possible".

August is in Thailand where it's 1AM but I wanted to thank Courtland for having us on IndieHackers. We've learned a lot from these interviews and are happy to give back.

Congrats for the awesome journey! A lot of useful insights that we will use for our startup too, answering on Stack Overflow is a thing that I didn't think about till now. At this moment we are using uptimerobot for our creative-tim.com and for our demos, blog etc. We will give a try to Cronitor too. The link for "http://startupli.st/" didn't work, do you have another one?

Sadly StartupLi.st was shut down, the creator writes for Mattermark now.

go it :D

Loved this interview. Thank you for sharing your journey.

I don't exactly remember how I first came across Cronitor (I thought it was IH, but I guess not), but you guys have been a big inspiration for me as I've been attempting to bootstrap my own side project into a business.

That is really great to hear. Keygen is looking polished!

Appreciate that! Looking to fully launch within the next month or so. :)

Cronitor is great. A few months back I used cronitor for a use case that ended up hitting their ping endpoint at about 10-15 QPS, and they said there was some capacity constraint they were running into (not exhausting though). I would love to hear more about the architecture behind cronitor.

Thanks Jake! We'll definitely write some posts in the coming months about our architecture. We never intended to be running a high-availability service, and we have learned a lot of lessons along the way.

Loved reading the article. I can really feel the authors/founder's sincerity in giving non-fluff answers.

I agree. Absolutely fantastic piece and a real encouragement to the rest of us who want to live that dream. I wish you guys the best for the future: you remind me a lot of a company I used to work for called Red Gate. Keep this up and I reckon there's a good chance you'll be making hundreds of thousands a month in five years' time.

Thanks so much y'all! Sincerely appreciate the encouragement, and if there's ever anything we can do to help out/give back to such a wonderful community please don't hesitate to get in touch with us.

I'm curious, how does Cronitor actually monitor that the URLs were pinged at the correct times or at all? Part of me thinks they are using cron to check statuses?

We built a python daemon that owns a shard of monitors, iterates them, reads recent history, and dispatches alerts when appropriate. The key things I thought were important when it was built were:

- stateless (needs to be able to be arbitrarily restarted at any time)

- fast (we need to be able to send alerts right when a job fails)

- simple (we will run pings thru a series of simple evaluators where test coverage is easy)

Interesting! This type of infrastructure and coding fascinates me, thanks for sharing!

Thanks for sharding!

This was a really great and inspiring interview. Thanks! I especially liked the "JIT mindset" idea!

Meh, I'd rather use https://github.com/jamesrwhite/minicron

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