How Cronitor Made My Developer Life Easier
‘Time is money,’ as the old saying goes. In our fast-moving world, it underlies the majority of successful stories. The favorable outcome of any business mainly depends on how good you can master this parameter. You should always be on top of your things.
Not only have you to meet all the deadlines but you also ought to provide quick reactions to various situations starting from the minor errors that occur on a website and ending with failures of scripts and programs. Truth be told, there are so many things that need to stay under the radar, it is nearly impossible to handle all this stuff manually.
Though if you are willing to spend your precious time in front of a desktop with a bunch of opened browser tabs and windows, monitoring all the parameters all day long then, of course, this is not about you. Nevertheless, for the majority of us, this plan of action is utterly unacceptable.
So, is there any way to avoid hand-operated actions and enjoy all the benefits of the technologies that first and foremost imply automation?
As it turns out, yes there is. The users of Unix-like operating systems are familiar with this solution that is a standard command in their beloved OS. Its primary task is to schedule directives to run at specific intervals and dates.
Taking this utility as a basis, the talented team from the Berkeley has succeeded in creating a cron job monitoring online service called Cronitor and making it available to the masses.
It is a lifesaver for all those who are accustomed to dealing with numerous threads of tasks. In a nutshell, it will help to prevent unwanted surprises, stay within your budget, get some extra time and instil confidence that everything is under control.
What is Cronitor?
The Cronitor is an intelligent assistant that was created specifically to monitor cron jobs, workers, services, APIs and other stuff. It is a reliable tool that saves you from unexpected outcomes thereby keeping you away from the extra expenditure.
With its real-time dashboard that provides visibility on backend systems, it is easy to keep an eye on scheduled tasks and stay responsive all the time.
If something goes wrong, it will generate the alert and send it to you and your team, guaranteeing that everyone is on the same page.
In my personal experience, it is an indispensable tool. As an owner of a regular website, I trust it to do lots of stuff. For example, Cronitor ensures that all my DB backups are done on time, the cache is emptied regularly, posts are published, broken links are deleted, or host is working.
Its potential is enormous since you can “ask” it to supervise anything that can make or receive HTTP requests. For example, if you have an e-store that does regular parsing, it can help to run the script at a predetermined time and notify you about a failure.
Made with micro service monitoring in mind it also enables you to deal with some non-trivial tasks. Here you will find tools for
- multi-region downtime verification that can be sent from Europe, America, and Asia;
- global healthcheck coverage;
- intermittent downtime detection;
- developer APIs;
- creating rich assertions;
- defining custom cookies, headers and some more.
Not all of the above listed functions are useful to me. I need only those (for example, intermittent downtime detection) that let me regularly monitor server and API health to catch situations when my server is down, or API works incorrectly.
However, all the extra features could come in handy in the future. I’m constantly working on introducing various improvements in order to enhance the work of a website from different angles so that defining custom cookies or headers might be valuable in prospect.
Another significant advantage of Cronitor lies in its native integration with other popular services like Slack, Hipchat, PageDuty and Custom Webhooks. As you can see, the list is small; nevertheless, it includes the cloud-based team collaboration tool that I believe everyone employs these days – Slack. Together they make sure that other members get all the critical alerts and notifications in time, making our teamwork efficient and productive.
Last but not least, support. While this factor may seem to be not so vital at first sight, but trust me on this, even the most advanced and polished online services can suffer a setback, experiencing difficulties; so that without a friendly, responsive and thoughtful support team you just can’t do. Cronitor is excellent at this. Just email the team, and they will do their best to sort out the issue.
Conclusion
Although Cronitor is not one of a kind, it focuses only on monitoring cron jobs and does not spread itself too thin. It has lots of valuable features, a handy dashboard, and great support – everything you may need to keep watch over the situation, avoid unexpected surprises and save you money.
