This is a follow-up to my previous post to let you know about the solution I chose.

Laust made me aware of an even simpler alternative to Proby called Dead Man’s Snitch. The idea is that you can set up one or more “snitches”. Each snitch has an associated URL which must be hit periodically or else an alert is sent out to the admin.

Configuration is trivial, just append the following to the job you want to monitor:

 && curl https://nosnch.in/591df25ece &> /dev/null

Obviously this assumes that the exit status of the job being monitoried is accurate.

The dashboard is pretty much the simplest thing that could possibly work:

My helpful screenshot

In fact, Dead Man’s Snitch is very minimalistic. Snitches can be configured to require a poke at least once per hour, day, week or month. That’s it. Unlike Proby they don’t care about the scheduling, and there is no mechanism to monitor how long your job takes to run (although you can optionally send metadata when you hit the snitch).

The first snitch is free, after that you have to upgrade to a pro subscription ($19/month) for unlimited snitches.