Snitch Activity

We’ve improved what you see when you’re looking at your snitches! When you check up on your snitch, you’ll see a report describing any recent incidents. With this, you will quickly be able to see if your snitch failed to check in at any point, how long it was missing, and if it still needs attention.

We also list your snitch’s check-in activity with all new graphics. It is now easy to see when during a period your snitch checked in. This visual can help you to find abnormalities in your job’s check in time, or just be reassured that everything is running as expected.

Icon Changes

Note, we changed the icon for when a snitch misses a check-in (in preparation for some future developments). You will now be alerted with a blue questionmark icon instead of the red 'X'.

Happy Snitching!

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.

We're excited to announce that the Dead Man's Snitch Android app is available for download! As an extension of your account you'll be able to:

• View your snitch dashboard and snitch status
• Filter your snitches by tags
• Receive push notifications when the status of your snitches change (Private Eye plan or higher)

Let us know what you think! If you're an iPhone user our app just got a refresh including swipe to pause and landscape mode.

Happy Snitching!

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 recently decided to move our blog off of Tumblr and into our main site. We wanted our blog to feel more like part of the main site and an integrated blog is also more SEO friendly.

We thought about publishing our blog as static files with Jekyll. However, it quickly became clear that sharing our main HTML layout file between Jekyll and our main Rails app was not going to be elegant. The layout file needed to be duplicated, making it tedious to keep up to date.

We only need a simple blog, so we ditched Jekyll and started to write vanilla Markdown files we could just render in Rails within our main HTML layout. It seemed to be working well and we were about to migrate all of our posts when someone pointed out a new kid on the block: ButterCMS.

ButterCMS is a blogging platform that sounded like just what we were looking for. They store the blog data. It's SEO friendly. Posts render server-side with no Javascript or iframes. The blog runs inside our app so it can use our existing layout. Even so, we can publish new posts without redeploying our application.

To top it off, ButterCMS setup is dead simple.

1. Sign up

2. Add their code library to your Rails or Django project

3. Copy over your API token

Done!

ButterCMS has been super supportive during our migration. Right now, they are advertising that they'll import your existing blog for free. They imported our Tumbler blog, and it came over fine.

We had to tweak ButterCMS's default views a bit, but we're happy that we don't have to manage our blog data. ButterCMS provides a nice little editor.

We are glad to now have a cleanly implemented blog on our main site. We plan to be posting more Dead Man's Snitch tips and tricks, as well as showcasing some of the creative applications people are using Dead Man's Snitch for.

In the mean time, if you're looking to integrate an SEO-friendly blog into your application, check out ButterCMS.

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!