We're extremely excited to announce that we now support sending alerts to PagerDuty! PagerDuty, an Incident Management System for IT Teams, provides alerting, on-call scheduling, escalation policies and incident tracking to increase uptime of your apps, servers, websites and databases. Dead Man's Snitch alerts will show up as incidents and your on-call team members will know immediately if your scheduled jobs go missing.

Integrating with PagerDuty is fast and simple. Head to your account integrations page to get started. Read about the details in our PagerDuty documentation.

We're extremely excited to announce that we now support sending alerts to Slack! Slack is a collaborative, real-time messaging app that brings all of your team’s communications together in one place. Dead Man's Snitch alerts will show up in your team's Slack channel making it easier to collaborate with your team as soon as your scheduled jobs go missing.

Setting up your account to send alerts to Slack is fast and easy! Head to your account integrations page to get started. Read up on the details in our Slack integration documentation.

Some customers may be required to include additional billing-related information to their receipts for accounting purposes.

Now you can easily add this information under Billing and it will be displayed on all of your receipts.

You may have noticed that new snitches now send an email when your job checks in for the first time.

Don't worry, you won't receive an email for every check-in. We just want you to have confidence that your job and Snitch are set up correctly.

Happy Snitching!

We've recently rolled out a couple of small features to make setting up your Snitches easier.

Dead Man's Snitch lets you set up each of your Snitches to send alerts to a unique email address. You could even send alerts to more than one email address if you separated the addresses with commas, as shown: "devops@example.com, alerts@example.com".

It's easy to mistype an address, however. To help out, Dead Man's Snitch will now autocomplete your email addresses. Any email used in your account will show up as an option in the autocomplete.

A similar autocomplete is available on your Snitch's tags as well.

New Snitch Install Methods

Since we now allow you to check in via email, we added directions explaining what email address to send your check-ins to.

We also added an example of checking in from Ruby using the Snitcher gem.

We plan to add examples in more languages soon. If there are any languages you'd like to see on the setup page, let us know at hi@deadmanssnitch.com.

We hope these improvements make setting up your Snitches easier.

Happy Snitching!

We’re excited to announce the ability to check-in your Snitches via email! Email check-ins have many use-cases and great for things like getting an email when your server goes down.

Get your Snitch email from the "Email" tab on the left column in the snitch install page. Alerts and check-ins work the same as using curl or the Snitcher gem.

Please Note: Checking in via email makes it easier to use Dead Man’s Snitch in situations where HTTPS isn’t feasible, though there are some caveats. While email is reliable, they can be easily delayed. Between the time an email is sent and the time it’s received, it usually goes through several intermediaries which may spool, delay, retry, or redirect it before it finally arrives at Dead Man’s Snitch. With check-ins being time sensitive, be aware that false alerts could occur if a snitch checks in towards the end of its period. For this reason we suggest using HTTPS if you can and only use email in cases where it’s the only option.

Happy Snitching!

We made a small update to our tooltips! Originally we only displayed check-in times in UTC. Some of our users shared with us that this was inconvenient and asked if we could convert the timestamps to their local time.

Now, all tooltips convert snitch check-in timestamps to a user’s local time zone and displays this in the tooltip on hover.

These tooltips are available on your dashboard…

…and the individual snitch activity page.

We appreciate your feedback. If there’s something you would like to see added reach out to us anytime!

Anyone who’s had 10s or 100s of snitches hasn’t had an easy way to organize their dashboards. We’re excited to announce that we released snitch tags today! Tags allow you to easily group snitches together based on projects, clients, environments, whatever! They automatically group by status so you don’t have to scroll through your entire dashboard to find the failures.

Creating Snitch Tags

Add tags to a snitch when you create or edit a snitch.  

Tags are displayed on each snitch install page for easy editing.

Snitches are automatically grouped by tag and status.

Try them out and let us know what you think!

Public API

Our API is now open to the public! Documentation is available here and your API key is on your Account page. We’d love to know how you’re using it!

Change Snitch Intervals Anytime

Until now, there wasn’t a way to change a snitch’s interval. You had to delete your snitch and create a new one with the new interval.

Now it’s super easy:

Don’t forget—it matters when you ping your snitch for the first time!

Happy Snitching!

15 & 30 Minute Intervals

We’re excited to announce that your #1 most requested feature, 15 and 30 minute intervals, are now live! Monitoring tasks that run multiples times per hour is now easier than ever. You’ll also receive alerts up to 4x faster than before—Enjoy!

UI Facelift

The dashboard needed some love. We redesigned your dashboard to make it even easier (and faster) to manage your snitches. It doesn’t stop here, though. We’ll be introducing new features and functionality in the near future. Stay tuned!

iPhone App

We carried the new UI into our beloved iPhone app. Push notification alerts are available if email alerts aren’t enough! The app is free to download here.

Never heard of Dead Man’s Snitch but use cron or Heroku Scheduler? Give it a try free!