[HN Gopher] Dead Man's Snitch - A Dead Simple Cron Job Monitorin...
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       Dead Man's Snitch - A Dead Simple Cron Job Monitoring Service
        
       Author : thunderbong
       Score  : 46 points
       Date   : 2022-05-15 15:24 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (deadmanssnitch.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (deadmanssnitch.com)
        
       | rich_sasha wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | awelkjlek wrote:
        
       | spicybright wrote:
       | $5/mo to monitor 3 cron jobs? And $50/mo if you want any kind of
       | notifications from it?
       | 
       | Am I reading that right?
        
         | gaffneyc wrote:
         | 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).
        
           | spicybright wrote:
           | Ah. Thank you for the clarification. Still a bit pricey for
           | what it is, but that's very nice having a free tier.
        
             | gaffneyc wrote:
             | 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.
        
       | encoderer wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | UncleEntity wrote:
         | 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(tm)
         | and you don't need weekly updates to prove a project is still
         | alive.
        
           | gaffneyc wrote:
           | 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.
        
           | encoderer wrote:
           | 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.
        
         | leetrout wrote:
         | I wish y'all would own the terraform provider directly. It
         | seems to have lagged behind.
        
           | encoderer wrote:
           | 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
        
         | gaffneyc wrote:
         | 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
        
           | Terry_Roll wrote:
           | > Lead developer behind Dead Man's Snitch here :wave:
           | 
           | Class! ;)
        
       | samstave wrote:
       | >" _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
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | njpatel wrote:
       | Who watches the Watchmen?
        
       | TedShiller wrote:
       | But what if the snitch fails? Maybe write a cron job for that
        
         | spicybright wrote:
         | Who snitches on snitches?
         | 
         | I feel like there's a java hammer factory joke somewhere here.
        
       | kayson wrote:
       | 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/
        
         | jonny789 wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | cuu508 wrote:
           | 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 !
        
       | efrecon wrote:
       | https://healthchecks.io/ is what I have used in the past. Pros
       | and cons of this one?
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-15 23:02 UTC)