Level up your Snitches with our two newest features: Smart Alerts and Error Notices. Both features are focused on letting you know as soon as possible that a critical job ran into problems. They also make it easier for you to get those issues fixed a lot sooner.

Together, Smart Alerts and Error Notices create a powerful combo. Error Notices let you know as soon as a job runs but errors, and Smart Alerts gives you a safety net when/if that job fails to run at all.

Smart Alerts

Smart Alerts empower your Snitches to let you know sooner when they go missing. Dead Man's Snitch will learn from your snitch's check-in behavior and adjust the expected check-in time as it learns more about when your snitch checks-in. This means no longer having to wait until the end of the day to find out your snitch failed to check-in 23 hours earlier.

Smart Alerts are available for weekly and monthly Snitches for all paid plans. Hourly and daily Snitches are supported on the Surveillance Van plan.

Error Notices

It's now possible (and highly recommended) to send your job's exit status along with your check-in rather than checking in only on success. If your job runs but errors, we will immediately notify you if something went wrong.

If you're already using the Dead Man's Snitch Field Agent, then there are no changes required and you can start getting Error Notices today.

If you're using an HTTP client (like Curl) to check-in, you can send the status as the "s" parameter in either the query or a form. We will treat an exit status of "0" as a success and anything else as a failure. When using Cron it's also important to always check-in whenever your job runs and not only on success. To do this replace "&&" with ";" and use "$?" to get the exit status of your command.

Example

run_backups_or_something.sh; curl https://nosnich.in/c2354d53d?s=$?

To get started with Error Notices you can read up on the documentation. This feature is available for users on the Surveillance Van plan.

Field Agent

If you haven't already, you may want to add our Field Agent to your tool set. Error Notices is just the first of a host of features we have planned that take advantage of the Field Agent. Start using the Field Agent today so you’ll be ready when we roll those features out.

Webhook Alerts

We have added a new integration for receiving alerts via HTTP POST, making it easier to incorporate Dead Man’s Snitch into your own tools and systems. Now you can build tools to better control how and when you get alerted beyond our support for Slack and PagerDuty.

Get started by reading up on our documentation before adding a new integration to your account. Webhooks are available for users on the Private Eye plan or higher. If you’re on the Lone Snitch or Little Birdy plan, head on over to Plans & Billing to upgrade today.

Snitcher (Ruby) 0.4.0 Released

The 0.4.0 release includes a new API client that makes integrating with the Dead Man’s Snitch API a lot easier. This release should make it easier to manage your Snitches with Chef or other custom tools.

Extensive documentation and examples can be found on GitHub.

If there’s anything else you would like to see us add for Dead Man’s Snitch in the future, drop us a line here.

Happy Snitching!