Dead Man's Snitch

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Easier Invoicing

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.


First Check-in Notification

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!


Nicer Snitch Setup With Autocomplete

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!


Snitch Check-in via Email

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!


Set a Billing Email

Send all billing related emails directly to your accounting department. If left blank, billing emails will be sent to the Account Email. Enter your password to confirm your changes.

Happy Snitching!


Send Alerts to Multiple Emails

Keep the right people (or the whole team) informed.

Per snitch:

Account-wide:

Happy Snitching!


iOS App Release & Updates

Exciting things are happening with Dead Man’s Snitch!

We have rolled out some great new features for Dead Man’s Snitch (DMS). Please take a moment and let us walk you through what we’ve been up to. We think you will appreciate what we have done.

iPhone App Available Now

Users can now download the DMS app to conveniently monitor their Snitches from their iPhone. The app will allow users to get alerts quickly and conveniently when their processes aren’t reporting back to DMS. Download the app here

Email Subject Line Alerts

New email subject line prefixes make viewing your Snitch alert emails faster and easier. The terms, [MISSING] and [REPORTING], will be displayed at the beginning of your email based on whether or not your processes are running.

New Logo & Visual Improvements

We are proud to finally roll out a logo for Dead Man’s Snitch. Up until now we relied on our status LED to represent us. We knew it was time to put a face on DMS and that is why we made a logo.

Additionally we have improved the appearance of UI elements in the web app to be in line with our new iPhone app. Updates will continue to be released as we enhance the functionality and user-experience of Dead Man’s Snitch.

Stay tuned & happy snitching!


Per-Snitch Alert Email Addresses

You can now specify per-snitch alert email addresses. You may do this if you want different people to receive the alerts for a Snitch.

Check out the FAQ for more information about which email address will be used when sending alerts.


Weekly Summaries

Over the last few months we’ve come to realize that months can go by without you hearing from us which can lead some people to wonder whether we are doing our job. So last week we launched weekly summaries which will hopefully give you the peace of mind that we are indeed doing our job as well as remind you if you have something misconfigured.

This feature has been really helpful for us and we hope it will be for you too.