Today we’re very excited to announce that we’ve made a new product acquisition: Dead Man’s Snitch.

I know many of you haven’t heard of Dead Man’s Snitch, but we’ve been users of it for almost a year, and quickly became big fans of the service.

The concept is pretty simple: If you have a periodic process such as a nightly backup cron or monthly data trim, you don’t have a good way to know when it doesn’t run for some reason. Many of us have been bit by something like a backup failing, or a monthly email not sending; Dead Man’s Snitch solves that problem. You get a notification when your process doesn’t run, and you can investigate it before it becomes a problem.

How easy is it to use? Extremely easy! If you have a cron job, for example, you just curl your unique snitch URL after the job:

rake pgbackups:archive && curl https://nosnch.in/c2354d53d2

We’re taking Dead Man’s Snitch over from Randy Schmidt who has done a great job of building and nurturing it this far. We’ve been lucky to get to know Randy over the last few months, and we’re intrigued to see what apps he’ll come out with next.

Dead Man’s Snitch is an exciting addition to our product portfolio. We’re exicted to help it grow and make it even better. We use DMS for our own apps like Harmony and many of our clients’ applications. If you run periodic tasks, please check out Dead Man’s Snitch and let us know what you think!

Also read Randy’s blog post.