Last year we introduced Field Agent, an important addition to your toolkit that gathers extra data on your critical tasks, packages it up, and radios it back to Dead Man's Snitch. Since then, we've been working on new ways to leverage the data that Field Agent collects to give you more insight into your Snitches and their failures.

Diagnosing why a job failed often involves jumping onto servers and parsing through logs to find out what happened. Starting today, we're making it easy to see the job's output to help get problems resolved faster with new error logs.

Error logs, a feature of Error Notices, are available right now to anyone using Field Agent and are on the Surveillance Van plan or higher. To get started you need to set up your job to be monitored by Field Agent. Our documentation is a great place to start. As always, if you have questions let us know.

For those of you who use integrations for alerts, don't worry. You'll be able to access error logs from Slack and PagerDuty, which will include a link right to the logs when available.

To start being alerted immediately when your job runs but errors, and access to the error log output, you may want to consider upgrading to the Surveillance Plan or higher.

Today we are introducing Field Agent, our new cross platform utility for monitoring your scripts and important jobs. Field Agent watches over your jobs, checks if they error, measures how long they take, and radios it all to Dead Man's Snitch.

We're not ready to take the wraps off of everything that the Field Agent is capable of just yet. We recommend you start using it today so you're able to take advantage of new features as they're released.

Field Agent is a stand alone binary that works on Windows, Linux, MacOS/OSX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Solaris. Having no dependencies means installation is easy and it will continue to work even as you upgrade your systems around it.

To get started, download Field Agent for your operating system. Unzip the binary, and then update your jobs to be run by the Field Agent.

If you're currently using curl you can switch to using the Field Agent by changing your existing call from this:

/path/to/important_script.sh && curl https://nosnch.in/SNITCHTOKEN

To this:

/path/to/dms SNITCHTOKEN /path/to/important_script.sh

If you have any questions please check out the documentation or get in touch.

Check-in via Amazon SNS Queues

You can now configure your Snitch's check-in URL to messages from Amazon SNS using an HTTPS subscription. It's now easier to check-in with Dead Man's Snitch when your RDS backups finish.

Happy Snitching!