
Show HN: My weekend project – simple cron monitoring - augustflanagan
https://cronitor.io
======
encoderer
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
You were not aware of [https://deadmanssnitch.com](https://deadmanssnitch.com)
?

~~~
encoderer
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.

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vijayaggarwal
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.

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

~~~
augustflanagan
hehe, thanks! these were fun to come up with!

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gmjosack
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.

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

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cheeken
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
Great point, that's an important oversight.

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

~~~
encoderer
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!

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

~~~
augustflanagan
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.

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0x420
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
Looking at this -- it's a Firefox regression apparently. Thanks for the heads
up!

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acron0
Awesome idea but the price outweighs the pain factor, for me.

~~~
encoderer
Well.. What would you pay? We're looking for more conversations with potential
users to help us find the right price points.

~~~
barce
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
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.

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spncr2
I've gotta hand it to
[https://deadmanssnitch.com](https://deadmanssnitch.com). Free referrals! :)

