6 ms·

Show HN: My weekend project – simple cron monitoring

29 points by augustflanagan 12y ago

encoderer 12y ago
Hey HN! My friend augustflanagan and I both had a need for some really simple cron monitoring. A way to monitor our critical jobs without configuring Nagios first. We wanted a simple SAAS monitoring solution that we could trust to alert us right away when a job isn't running on schedule. We mentioned this to a couple of friends who said they needed the same simple monitoring. Having people tell you they need something is a great motivator, so we built cronitor in a couple of weekends and are putting it out there. We'd love feedback and suggestions on how to make it better. Thanks!
- js2 12y ago
  You were not aware of https://deadmanssnitch.com https://deadmanssnitch.com ?
  - thibaut_barrere 12y ago
    There are others, like Proby (which I mentioned here [1]), yet I find that having more competitors in that space would be helpful, because not everyone has exactly the same needs. Congrats for shipping! [1] https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/writing-reliable-cron-jobs https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/writing-reliable-cron-jobs
  - encoderer 12y ago
    We gave it a shot but there were a couple things we needed that we couldn't get from DMS. Specifically, I have hourly jobs that started taking longer than an hour to run. I needed timing-based alerts for that. We also needed to be alerted in real time in a way DMS doesn't provide.
- barce 12y ago
  Cool, what did you guys code this in? I'm working on a weekend project for an EventBrite competitor focused on a really niche group of users.
  - augustflanagan 12y ago
    Thanks! It's a django app that uses Mandrill for sending email, and Twilio for sending sms alerts.
    - encoderer 12y ago
      And the monitoring and alerting is done with a python daemon.
      - barce 12y ago
        Thanks guys! I love using Twilio. I'm more of a Rails guy but I see that the design challenges will be the same.
0x420 12y ago
Looks cool. The "Pick this Plan" buttons at the bottom don't appear to be working, though. I'm not sure if you're aware of that.
- encoderer 12y ago
  Looking at this -- it's a Firefox regression apparently. Thanks for the heads up!
eam 12y ago
I really liked the plan names especially the top plan, NSA (Monitor Everything). Got a good laugh out of it. :)
- augustflanagan 12y ago
  hehe, thanks! these were fun to come up with!
acron0 12y ago
Awesome idea but the price outweighs the pain factor, for me.
- __xtrimsky 12y ago
  I agree with you. It's cool, but not 7$ / month, or 20$ /month cool.
- thibaut_barrere 12y ago
  As a counter-point I will say that most of my freelancing clients are perfectly willing to pay that and more, for platforms where a cron that misbehaves has consequences. I would suggest not to lower the prices :-) EDIT: I prefer to pay more than $20/mo if this means that your product won't end up being stale and unmaintained.
- encoderer 12y ago
  Well.. What would you pay? We're looking for more conversations with potential users to help us find the right price points.
  - barce 12y ago
    The prices seem really reasonable and a steal if I was still in an enterprise environment. I'm not maintaining any prod servers right now, but $4.99 would be a sweet spot if I had a few hobby servers on the Internet that I was doing devops for.
    - toomuchtodo 12y ago
      Wow, that's extremely low pricing you're looking for. I think the current pricing isn't only fair, but the top end is somewhat low.
  - acron0 12y ago
    I agree with the sentiment of the other comments in that the price issue is only an issue from a single-user perspective and is fine for enterprise.
tyrionaura 12y ago
Good to have the "one is always free" plan, will give it a try.
spncr2 12y ago
I've gotta hand it to https://deadmanssnitch.com https://deadmanssnitch.com. Free referrals! :)
gmjosack 12y ago
One way I've solved this in the past which is a bit hacky but novel and fun was to set the MAILTO to some e-mail address like cron-error@ and use the local postfix process to map that e-mail to a command via transports. This allows us to inject cron errors into our exception tracking system and alert minimizing the amount of cron storming to our inboxes.
vijayaggarwal 12y ago
Writing a fail-safe cron is an incredibly hard job as crons are infamous for failing rather silently. The cron script writer must take a very pessimist approach and handle every possibility of error. Even then, some scenarios are easy to miss. Following are some cases I have come across often: 1. crash - any runtime error that causes your script to stop execution abruptly. 2. un-handled, non-crashing error - db connection failure, remote api failure, file not found, etc. The script may continue execution, the results may not be logically correct. 3. concurrent execution - What if an instance of cron is not over by the time the next instance should start? crontab will simply start the next instance. 4. internet connection error - even the notification mechanism will fail if it depends on an active internet connection. Your service is a very valuable one, and a challenging one too I believe. You can do a lot many things in cron monitoring and reporting.
crazyiiiiii 12y ago
Any chance of selling a version I can host myself? Or, even better, making it open source? Congrats on shipping tho!
- encoderer 12y ago
  It was important for us to focus on the MVP but we've actually discussed both of those options from day one. There are some disadvantages to self hosting a monitoring tool. But certainly there are circumstances where self hosting is very important. I could certainly see us releasing code for the website and monitor daemon under an OSS license at some point. Thanks for giving it a look!
yansuck 12y ago
I really doubt this is just a weekend project. I am sorry but titles like this has been getting on my nerves.
- krapp 12y ago
  Yeah.. I have a 'weekend project' that i've been working on for... almost a year now. And mostly not even weekends.
- augustflanagan 12y ago
  You're right. Weekends project would be a better title. We built an end to end proof of concept our first weekend on it, then spent another Sunday polishing it as well as a few hours here and there a couple of evenings.
cheeken 12y ago
Neat little service! I'd be careful about &&'ing commands together (as in the timing example) should one of the pre-command curl calls fail. It would be a serious kick in the pants if the service to monitor the health of your cron jobs was (indirectly) responsible for preventing them from running.
- encoderer 12y ago
  Great point, that's an important oversight.

Hey HN! My friend augustflanagan and I both had a need for some really simple cron monitoring. A way to monitor our critical jobs without configuring Nagios first. We wanted a simple SAAS monitoring solution that we could trust to alert us right away when a job isn't running on schedule. We mentioned this to a couple of friends who said they needed the same simple monitoring. Having people tell you they need something is a great motivator, so we built cronitor in a couple of weekends and are putting it out there. We'd love feedback and suggestions on how to make it better. Thanks!

js2 12y ago
You were not aware of https://deadmanssnitch.com https://deadmanssnitch.com ?
- thibaut_barrere 12y ago
  There are others, like Proby (which I mentioned here [1]), yet I find that having more competitors in that space would be helpful, because not everyone has exactly the same needs. Congrats for shipping! [1] https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/writing-reliable-cron-jobs https://www.wisecashhq.com/blog/writing-reliable-cron-jobs
- encoderer 12y ago
  We gave it a shot but there were a couple things we needed that we couldn't get from DMS. Specifically, I have hourly jobs that started taking longer than an hour to run. I needed timing-based alerts for that. We also needed to be alerted in real time in a way DMS doesn't provide.
barce 12y ago
Cool, what did you guys code this in? I'm working on a weekend project for an EventBrite competitor focused on a really niche group of users.
- augustflanagan 12y ago
  Thanks! It's a django app that uses Mandrill for sending email, and Twilio for sending sms alerts.
  - encoderer 12y ago
    And the monitoring and alerting is done with a python daemon.
    - barce 12y ago
      Thanks guys! I love using Twilio. I'm more of a Rails guy but I see that the design challenges will be the same.

0x420 12y ago

Looks cool. The "Pick this Plan" buttons at the bottom don't appear to be working, though. I'm not sure if you're aware of that.

encoderer 12y ago
Looking at this -- it's a Firefox regression apparently. Thanks for the heads up!

eam 12y ago

I really liked the plan names especially the top plan, NSA (Monitor Everything). Got a good laugh out of it. :)

augustflanagan 12y ago
hehe, thanks! these were fun to come up with!

acron0 12y ago

Awesome idea but the price outweighs the pain factor, for me.

__xtrimsky 12y ago
I agree with you. It's cool, but not 7$ / month, or 20$ /month cool.
thibaut_barrere 12y ago
As a counter-point I will say that most of my freelancing clients are perfectly willing to pay that and more, for platforms where a cron that misbehaves has consequences. I would suggest not to lower the prices :-) EDIT: I prefer to pay more than $20/mo if this means that your product won't end up being stale and unmaintained.
encoderer 12y ago
Well.. What would you pay? We're looking for more conversations with potential users to help us find the right price points.
- barce 12y ago
  The prices seem really reasonable and a steal if I was still in an enterprise environment. I'm not maintaining any prod servers right now, but $4.99 would be a sweet spot if I had a few hobby servers on the Internet that I was doing devops for.
  - toomuchtodo 12y ago
    Wow, that's extremely low pricing you're looking for. I think the current pricing isn't only fair, but the top end is somewhat low.
- acron0 12y ago
  I agree with the sentiment of the other comments in that the price issue is only an issue from a single-user perspective and is fine for enterprise.

tyrionaura 12y ago

Good to have the "one is always free" plan, will give it a try.

spncr2 12y ago

I've gotta hand it to https://deadmanssnitch.com https://deadmanssnitch.com. Free referrals! :)

gmjosack 12y ago

One way I've solved this in the past which is a bit hacky but novel and fun was to set the MAILTO to some e-mail address like cron-error@ and use the local postfix process to map that e-mail to a command via transports. This allows us to inject cron errors into our exception tracking system and alert minimizing the amount of cron storming to our inboxes.

vijayaggarwal 12y ago

Writing a fail-safe cron is an incredibly hard job as crons are infamous for failing rather silently. The cron script writer must take a very pessimist approach and handle every possibility of error. Even then, some scenarios are easy to miss. Following are some cases I have come across often: 1. crash - any runtime error that causes your script to stop execution abruptly. 2. un-handled, non-crashing error - db connection failure, remote api failure, file not found, etc. The script may continue execution, the results may not be logically correct. 3. concurrent execution - What if an instance of cron is not over by the time the next instance should start? crontab will simply start the next instance. 4. internet connection error - even the notification mechanism will fail if it depends on an active internet connection. Your service is a very valuable one, and a challenging one too I believe. You can do a lot many things in cron monitoring and reporting.

crazyiiiiii 12y ago

Any chance of selling a version I can host myself? Or, even better, making it open source? Congrats on shipping tho!

encoderer 12y ago
It was important for us to focus on the MVP but we've actually discussed both of those options from day one. There are some disadvantages to self hosting a monitoring tool. But certainly there are circumstances where self hosting is very important. I could certainly see us releasing code for the website and monitor daemon under an OSS license at some point. Thanks for giving it a look!

yansuck 12y ago

I really doubt this is just a weekend project. I am sorry but titles like this has been getting on my nerves.

krapp 12y ago
Yeah.. I have a 'weekend project' that i've been working on for... almost a year now. And mostly not even weekends.
augustflanagan 12y ago
You're right. Weekends project would be a better title. We built an end to end proof of concept our first weekend on it, then spent another Sunday polishing it as well as a few hours here and there a couple of evenings.

cheeken 12y ago

Neat little service! I'd be careful about &&'ing commands together (as in the timing example) should one of the pre-command curl calls fail. It would be a serious kick in the pants if the service to monitor the health of your cron jobs was (indirectly) responsible for preventing them from running.

encoderer 12y ago
Great point, that's an important oversight.