Dead Man's Snitch – A Dead Simple Cron Job Monitoring Service | Hacker News Reader

Dead Man's Snitch – A Dead Simple Cron Job Monitoring Service

deadmanssnitch.com

69 pointsthunderbong24 comments

You can also use Healthchecks[0] or Uptime-Kuma[1] both of which are open source and self-hostable!

I've been using both for a while and they're great. Healtchecks has first class integration in borgmatic[3], and is in my opinion the better choice for cron jobs. Uptime-Kuma has a really nice interface and also supports checking hosts/services via ping or http request. It also supports "push" requests a la healthchecks but there's a weird race condition bug that makes it misfire (PR is waiting to be merged). It also has status dashboards with incidents.

[0] https://healthchecks.io/

[1] https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

[3] https://torsion.org/borgmatic/

I have just started using healthchecks.io . Could you tell me how to view request body part of the check using their api ?

`curl --header "X-Api-Key: your-api-key" https://healthchecks.io/api/v1/checks/<uuid>` does not contain the passed request body.

The API does not return the logged request body, you can currently access it via the web UI only. Happy to discuss feature suggestions and use cases at https://github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks/discussions !

I also use Healthchecks.io.

Originally i self hosted it, but their free plan is more than generous enough for my needs (20 jobs monitored for free i think).

Besides monitoring backups and cron jobs, i use it for monitoring the power state of my summerhouse. We had a problem with a breaker that would trip for no reason, and since nobody wants to arrive at a summerhouse where the fridge has been unpowered for a couple of weeks, i put a RPi Zero W up there on the circuit of the problematic breaker, and set it to call Healthchecks every 15 minutes. If it misses 2, i (might) have a problem.

So far the alarm has gone off twice, both times (fortunately) internet connection releated.

I’ll give credit where it’s due, Dead Mans Snitch inspired us to build Cronitor, but I’m pretty sure this is in maintenance mode.

It’s a great proof of concept that something like this should exist that gives developers observability for their cron jobs and background tasks but they seemed to have stopped working on it, so we started in 2014 and have shipped about every week since.

Ultimately, we believe you can’t trust software you can’t see. Background jobs are like the cities underground - absolutely essential to survival and easy to forget about as you move around on the surface getting things done.

Their app was last released 5 months ago and the change log says they are working on adding new features.

I think maybe simple and working is sometimes Good Enough™ and you don’t need weekly updates to prove a project is still alive.

I’m just calling it how i see it. 5 months ago and before that? 4 years. That’s maintenance mode.

Besides, you are talking about the app, with this kind of saas, the app doesn’t really matter.

Simple and reliable take a surprising amount of time to get right. We would rather move slowly and cautiously because we have thousands of operations folks who could have a really bad time if we rush something that causes folks to get paged at 2am or lose trust in the system.

Also, we’re bad at talking about the work we do. It’s the classic trap a lot of engineering founders fall into.

I wish y'all would own the terraform provider directly. It seems to have lagged behind.

Thanks for letting me know. We can prioritize that.

We took over most of the open source SDKs last year and then all of a sudden felt the burden of 5 new codebases so we cooled it for a bit.

This year we have been rolling out deeper SDKs with auto provisioning that in some cases might eliminate the need for terraform - Eg k8s, sidekiq, airflow and celery

Lead developer behind Dead Man’s Snitch here :wave:

We are definitely not in “maintenance mode” and have a lot of things in the works. With the last couple of years being what they’ve been things have often taken longer than we’d like but they’re certainly in motion.

edit: fixed tpyo

> Lead developer behind Dead Man’s Snitch here :wave:

Class! ;)

Great to hear. Have used Dead Man's Snitch in the past and plan to do so again in the future.

$5/mo to monitor 3 cron jobs? And $50/mo if you want any kind of notifications from it?

Am I reading that right?

Close but not quite.

1 is always free (includes email notifications)

$5/month for 3 with email notifications

$19/month adds integrations for notifications through services like Slack, PagerDuty, and Squadcast (among others).

Ah. Thank you for the clarification. Still a bit pricey for what it is, but that's very nice having a free tier.

Hopefully what you’re monitoring is valuable to you or the company you’re working for (otherwise why monitor it?).

If you have a personal project and need a few extra monitors (Snitches) then reach out to support. Happy to help out any way we can.

https://healthchecks.io/ is what I have used in the past. Pros and cons of this one?

There is an alternative as a Telegram bot https://t.me/dead_man_switch_bot - it is free and easy to use (bot author here). I use to monitor about 25 cronjobs in multiple group chats.

But what if the snitch fails? Maybe write a cron job for that

Who snitches on snitches?

I feel like there's a java hammer factory joke somewhere here.

Looks interesting.

I can’t unsee the testimonial with a picture of a guy posing with what looks like one of North Korea’s Kim statues.

>"If you have a task that runs every six hours, round up to Daily.

So... this isnt good? How long can a thing be down before snitches be bitch~es~in'?

Also, apparently imgur thinks P90X is Gay.

https://i.imgur.com/gayP90x.png

Who watches the Watchmen?

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