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.
Originally i self hosted it, but their free plan is more than generous enough for my needs (20 jobs monitored for free i think).
Besides monitoring backups and cron jobs, i use it for monitoring the power state of my summerhouse. We had a problem with a breaker that would trip for no reason, and since nobody wants to arrive at a summerhouse where the fridge has been unpowered for a couple of weeks, i put a RPi Zero W up there on the circuit of the problematic breaker, and set it to call Healthchecks every 15 minutes. If it misses 2, i (might) have a problem.
So far the alarm has gone off twice, both times (fortunately) internet connection releated.
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.
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.
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.
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
There is an alternative as a Telegram bot https://t.me/dead_man_switch_bot - it is free and easy to use (bot author here). I use to monitor about 25 cronjobs in multiple group chats.
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/