Hacker News Reader

Hello HN.

We were occasionally running into issues where our scheduled tasks would not start when expected. There were many reasons for this (environment changes, lock files not being cleaned up properly, etc). So, we created a simple application to monitor our scheduled tasks, and notify us if they didn't start or finish when expected. Now we're notified immediately (via email or SMS) when a scheduled task isn't kicked off when it is supposed to.

The app also keeps track of the run times for past task executions, which has been useful in tracking down unexpected changes in task run times.

Proby is currently in closed beta, meaning we're letting people in slowly. It is currently running on a VPS with a few other services. We want to see if there is an interest in the app before purchasing better/additional hardware.

Use of the app is currently free. At some point, when it is out of beta, we may begin charging a small fee for the service (although I'd imagine we'd have a free plan of some sort). But, all of that is still up in the air.

What do you think?

Ultimately for me, this would replace logs and email notification that are supported pretty well out of the box with cron. It is nice to have multiple scheduled tasks consolidated with a dashboard style interface.

I am confused with the selecting a timezone but all of the times being represented in UTC?

Also the representation of the cron schedule (7 * * * *) which I think could be represented in a more intuitive way. I have been looking at crontabs for years and every time I have to second guess myself.

This seems like a service that I would never want any downtime with, how do you manage that?

The time zone setting for the task is used to determine when Proby should be expecting a notification from that task. We're still thinking of the best way to display the times on the dashboard. Listing all of the tasks in the same time zone makes them easily sortable based on the last execution time (we could still support this sort order while displaying the tasks in their configured time zone...but it may be more confusing if each time was in a different time zone). We've also thought about listing all of the tasks in the user's time zone. Jury's still out on this.

Representing the cron schedule in some other format is also feedback we have received before. I just haven't found a way to cleanly and concisely display the schedule in a format other than the cron format.

Regarding the downtime...we don't manage that right now. We're running on a single VPS. The goal of the beta is to determine if there is enough interest (and potential financial support) to deploy Proby to a more robust and fault tolerant setup.

Thanks for the feedback!

totally agree on the cron format. we could take a look at cronwtf as a cron to english translator. (http://cronwtf.github.com/ and https://github.com/technoweenie/cronwtf)

Reminds me that I need to build something in Nagios to do this for my cronjobs.

The idea of sending my cronjobs to someone else to do this creeps me about (perhaps irrationally), but either way, thanks for the reminder I need to do this myself :)

Very nice, but one suggestion, the 'dashboard' view might benefit from showing a sequence of graphics that show either the status of the last x number of runs:

  X X X ok ok ok X ok

obviously color-coded to stand out, or at a minimum show the time elapsed since last successful run.

This way provides a real at-a-glance way to see one or more broken tasks.

Good suggestion, thanks!

It looks pretty nice ... and adding the start and finish notifications doesn't seem too hard.

But it seems to me that if Doug really meant what he said below, he would have got up, walked down the hallway and given John a real pat on the back ;)

Ha :) They actually work from home four days a week, so he'd have to get in his car and drive to his house to do that.

heh, well, that's a bit harder /c most of our team is remote, but you're right. John, you get a cookie on Friday!

Cool! ... I too sit in my home-office and often think about how much of my day was spent in worthless activity at the office. Sounds like you guys have a great company culture ... I had to quit that job to become enlightened.

I'll be expecting that pat on the back when I come in on Friday Doug...

Nice work John! My favorite feature is seeing a graph of historical run time. Really helpful to figure out how a job is doing performance wise.

Looks great. Is that your own design or based on a template from Themeforest or similar? If a template, do you mind saying which one?

The design was done in house at Signal by Drew Myler. That boy can make a pile of horse shit look sexy.

Show HN: Proby - Task monitoring made simple