Dead Man's Snitch
Dead-simple heartbeat monitoring for scheduled jobs
What is Dead Man's Snitch?
Dead Man's Snitch is a focused, hosted heartbeat monitoring service built around one idea: your scheduled job pings a unique URL when it finishes, and if that ping goes quiet, you get alerted before the silence becomes a problem. Setup is minimal — assign a name, choose an interval (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or enhanced sub-hourly on paid plans), and add a single curl call to the end of your script. The service covers cron jobs, Heroku Scheduler tasks, or any periodic process that can make an outbound HTTP request.
Beyond the basic "did it run?" check, Dead Man's Snitch offers a Field Agent wrapper that captures exit status, runtime, and output so you can triage failures without logging into a server. Higher-tier plans unlock Smart Alerts (adaptive expected check-in times learned from historical behavior), Error Notices (immediate alert when a job runs but exits with an error), integrations with Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Microsoft Teams, VictorOps, Amazon SNS, ilert, and webhooks, plus a REST API and unlimited team members. iOS and Android apps provide push notifications. Two years of check-in history are retained for all paid accounts.
Best For
- Teams that need fast, no-frills heartbeat monitoring with minimal instrumentation overhead
- Projects already running their own schedulers (cron, Heroku Scheduler, systemd timers) that only need a reliable watchdog layer
- Developers who want a battle-tested, single-purpose tool rather than a broader platform
- Small teams or individuals on the free or entry-level plan who monitor a handful of jobs
- Organizations that prefer integrating alerts into existing on-call tools like PagerDuty or Opsgenie rather than managing a separate alerting stack
Limitations
- Monitoring only — Dead Man's Snitch does not schedule or execute your jobs; you must run your own scheduler (cron, Heroku Scheduler, etc.) separately
- Integrations (Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Teams, webhooks, etc.) and Smart Alerts are locked to the Private Eye ($19/month) and Surveillance Van ($49/month) tiers; the entry-level Little Birdy plan ($5/month, 3 snitches) and the free plan offer email alerts only
- No built-in uptime (HTTP endpoint) checks or public status pages — the service is scoped exclusively to heartbeat / dead-man's-switch monitoring
- Proprietary hosted SaaS only; no self-hosted or open-source option for the core service, and on-premise deployment requires contacting the vendor
Dead Man's Snitch vs CronJobPro
Dead Man's Snitch and CronJobPro overlap on heartbeat monitoring — both let a job ping a URL to confirm it ran, and both alert you via channels like Slack, PagerDuty, and email when a ping goes missing. Dead Man's Snitch has a long track record in this narrow space, a polished Field Agent wrapper for capturing exit codes, and an adaptive Smart Alerts system that learns your job's historical timing patterns, which are genuine strengths for teams that only need a watchdog layer on top of their existing scheduler. CronJobPro covers a broader scope: it both executes scheduled HTTP cron jobs on your behalf and monitors them through the same platform, so teams that do not want to manage their own scheduler can have scheduling, heartbeat monitoring, uptime checks, multi-channel alerts (email, Slack, Discord, Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, webhook), and public status pages under one account. The practical trade-off is focus versus consolidation: Dead Man's Snitch is the right choice if you already have a reliable scheduler and want a dedicated, proven monitoring layer; CronJobPro is the better fit when you want to run and monitor jobs from a single tool without maintaining separate infrastructure.
Official Website
https://deadmanssnitch.comFrequently Asked Questions
What is Dead Man's Snitch?
Dead Man's Snitch is a focused, hosted heartbeat monitoring service built around one idea: your scheduled job pings a unique URL when it finishes, and if that ping goes quiet, you get alerted before the silence becomes a problem. Setup is minimal — assign a name, choose an interval (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or enhanced sub-hourly on paid plans), and add a single curl call to the end of your script. The service covers cron jobs, Heroku Scheduler tasks, or any periodic process that can make an outbound HTTP request.
What is Dead Man's Snitch best for?
Teams that need fast, no-frills heartbeat monitoring with minimal instrumentation overhead. Projects already running their own schedulers (cron, Heroku Scheduler, systemd timers) that only need a reliable watchdog layer. Developers who want a battle-tested, single-purpose tool rather than a broader platform. Small teams or individuals on the free or entry-level plan who monitor a handful of jobs. Organizations that prefer integrating alerts into existing on-call tools like PagerDuty or Opsgenie rather than managing a separate alerting stack.
How does Dead Man's Snitch compare to an external cron service?
Dead Man's Snitch and CronJobPro overlap on heartbeat monitoring — both let a job ping a URL to confirm it ran, and both alert you via channels like Slack, PagerDuty, and email when a ping goes missing. Dead Man's Snitch has a long track record in this narrow space, a polished Field Agent wrapper for capturing exit codes, and an adaptive Smart Alerts system that learns your job's historical timing patterns, which are genuine strengths for teams that only need a watchdog layer on top of their existing scheduler. CronJobPro covers a broader scope: it both executes scheduled HTTP cron jobs on your behalf and monitors them through the same platform, so teams that do not want to manage their own scheduler can have scheduling, heartbeat monitoring, uptime checks, multi-channel alerts (email, Slack, Discord, Teams, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, webhook), and public status pages under one account. The practical trade-off is focus versus consolidation: Dead Man's Snitch is the right choice if you already have a reliable scheduler and want a dedicated, proven monitoring layer; CronJobPro is the better fit when you want to run and monitor jobs from a single tool without maintaining separate infrastructure.
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