If your team is on Microsoft Teams then it's time to team up with Dead Man's Snitch to bring our alerts out of your inbox and into your team's chat.
Adding an alerting integration with Microsoft Teams should take only a minute or two. You can find step by step instructions in our Microsoft Teams documentation.
Microsoft Teams joins our growing list of integrations from Slack to Mattermost to Opsgenie and beyond.
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.
We're excited to announce that Dead Man's Snitch is now easier to use with your entire team. Gone are the days of sharing a single login or using a shared mailing list for alerts. Now, everyone on your team can have their own login and personalized alert settings. Using Slack or PagerDuty and don't need emails? You can now opt out of email alerts as well.
We want Dead Man's Snitch to be a great fit for teams of any size. So all of our paid plans allow you to invite as many team members as you need, at no extra cost. All team members are able to monitor and manage Snitches, create new API keys, and add or develop their own integrations.
Ready to get started? Start inviting your team now.
Along with better support for teams, we're also introducing Cases, a new way to separate your Snitches by project or team. With Cases, you can organize Snitches from multiple projects, applications, or teams in a way that makes sense to you. There's also no need to log in and out to access the Cases. Each Case has its own set of team members and integrations, so alerting the right team members of any issues is easy.
Need help moving Snitches around? Let us know and we can help move your Snitches between Cases.
Dead Man’s Snitch now supports multiple API keys. The ability to enable or disable API access over a variety of services will give you more control, security, and granularity. If you are currently utilizing an API key through Dead Man’s Snitch, that key will continue to work without interruption. For more information on multiple API keys, visit our documentation.
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 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.
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 "$?" to get the exit status of your command.
run_backups_or_something.sh; curl https://nosnich.in/c2354d53d?s=$?
To get started with Error Notices you can read up on the documentation. This feature is available for users on the Surveillance Van plan.
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.
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/SNITCHTOKENTo this:
/path/to/dms SNITCHTOKEN /path/to/important_script.shIf you have any questions please check out the documentation or get in touch.
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!
Version 2.2.0 of the Dead Man's Snitch iOS app is now available for download. The latest version is aimed at making it much easier for you to see what exactly is going on with your job, just like you would if you logged into your dashboard at deadmanssnitch.com.
When viewing snitches on your iOS device, you can now tap on an individual snitch to get a more detailed breakdown. You are now able to view recent history, tags, notes, and messages that were sent with a check-in. With these added details, if something does go wrong with a job, you'll be able to react faster.
In order to make the experience between the app and the website much more seamless, we've updated the icons as well. Another thing we did is fix a bug revolving around error handling. Previously, if there was a network or HTTP error, the app would hang on the loading screen and never display anything. With new error handling, you now know what exactly went wrong.
If you haven't updated to the newest version of Dead Man's Snitch for iOS yet, head on over to the App Store today.
Happy Snitching!
With the recent launch of the Webhook integrations on Dead Man's Snitch it's now easier to hook our alerts into your systems and operations workflow. Webhooks give you the ability to receive critical notifications about your snitches at custom URLs. Zapiermakes it easy to take our Webhook alerts and route them to a large and ever growing list of other systems and services.
In this example, we are going to use Zapier to create an alert log in Google Sheets.
The first step is to log into Zapier and create a new Zap with "Catch Hook" as the trigger.
Next, copy the example JSON payload, paste into the "Pick off a Child Key" text field, and then press "Continue". Feel free to only include the information you would like to receive in the payload. You can check out the documentation on Dead Man's Snitch for more setup options.
{
"type": "snitch.reporting",
"timestamp": "2016-07-15T14:13:32.013Z",
"data": {
"snitch": {
"token": "c2354d53d2",
"name": "Critical System Reports",
"notes": "Useful notes for dealing with the situation",
"tags": [ "critical", "reports" ],
"status": "healthy",
"previous_status": "missing"
}
}
}Once you are on the test step, copy the webhook URL.
-71ff313f.png)
Now, add a webhooks integration on Dead Man's Snitch using the copied URL.
After the integration is created, press the "Sent Test" button to send a test
payload to the endpoint.
Back on the Zapier page press the "Ok, I did this" button and wait for Zapier to receive your webhook.
-dc3fb7a4.png)
Now, set up the action by searching for Google Sheets. Set the action to create
a new row in a specific spreadsheet.
-36cfe4ff.png)
After you've connected your Google account and selected a spreadsheet, create
headers for all the information in the payload.
-32769ee1.png)
Populate all the columns with the sample JSON information from the payload.
-5809ff0f.png)
Make sure to save your Zap and give it a creative name! Now when Dead Man's Snitch alerts on a failed or missing job, it will automatically update your spreadsheet with the information you customized.
Is there another webhook integration you would like us to look into? Let us know!
Happy Snitching!
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.
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!
We've made it easier to access your invoices and track your expenses. Now, when you receive your email confirming your payment, your invoice is attached right to the email.
As always, you can still find a list of all your invoices on your plan page.
Our Slack Integration just got some exciting enhancements! You can now use
the /dms slash command to get information about your snitches
right in your Slack channel. You can use it to get a list of your snitches,
or check up on a single snitch.
Use /dms missing to get a list of all your snitches that missed
their check in, or /dms status followed by a snitches name or
token to see how that snitch is doing. /dms list
will show you a list of all your snitches. Take control by tacking
on a tag or a status to filter the list that is given.
Integrations are available for users on the Private Eye plan or higher. Head to Plans & Billing to upgrade, or your integrations page to get set up! You can read more about our Slack integrations to find out more.