With the latest version of Dead Man's Snitch for Android, we have taken a big step toward giving you the information you need to react quickly and appropriately when the unexpected occurs. Our Android development team has been hard at work so you can get more information about your snitches at a glance.

Snitch Details and Check-in History

In addition to seeing the current state of your snitches, you can now dig deeper to see more information about what is going on within the app. Now you can see your notes about the job and how to fix it if something goes wrong. You can also see the history of your check-in periods and any messages that were sent when it completed or failed.

React Quickly with Enhanced Notifications

We have enhanced our notifications to make it clearer which snitches are acting up and what they are doing. Each snitch now has its own notification stream showing you a timeline of the latest activity right from your lock screen.

Swipe to dismiss the notifications, or click them to open the app directly to the detail screen. Use your notes to let you and your team know about job priority and provide debugging guidelines. Send messages when your jobs succeed or fail so you can react quickly to the problem at hand.

Just as before, you will get push notifications to the app provided you have an upgraded plan. You can also pause any failing snitches to stop those notifications while you investigate the problem, or just decide to wait and see what happens. Either way, we'll still notify you when everything starts working again.

Go download the app to your Android device and start getting informed!

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!