Dead Man’s Snitch

What do you like best?

Very easy to set up for tasks you just need basic monitoring on whether they ran successfully when they were expected to. Easily able to be integrated with other systems, we use it with Rundeck, Slack, and VictorOps. Adding a new snitch when we create new tasks that need to be monitored takes very little time.

What do you dislike?

There are a few more options for setting expected run times that would be helpful to avoid false alerts. The biggest help would be to be able to set days you don't expect something to run, such as tasks that only run on weekdays end up alerting on the weekends, unless you set up multiple alerts for each day of the week.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We use it for monitoring tasks that run via crontabs on servers, as well as via Rundeck. It has helped us greatly reduce issues caused by tasks that didn't run when expected, and allowed us to fix said issues much faster than in the past, when it could take us days to realize something wasn't correctly working.