Healthchecks.io: Open Source Alerting For Your Cron Jobs with Pēteris Caune

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January 13th, 2018

27 mins 24 secs

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About this Episode

Summary

Your backups are running every day, right? Are you sure? What about that daily report job? We all have scripts that need to be run on a periodic basis and it is easy to forget about them, assuming that they are working properly. Sometimes they fail and in order to know when that happens you need a tool that will let you know so that you can find and fix the problem. Pēteris Caune wrote Healthchecks to be that tool and made it available both as an open source project and a hosted version. In this episode he discusses his motivation for starting the project, the lessons he has learned while managing the hosting for it, and how you can start using it today.

Preface

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  • Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Pēteris Caune about Healthchecks, a Django app which serves as a watchdog for your cron tasks

Interview

  • Introductions
  • How did you get introduced to Python?
  • Can you start by explaining what Healthchecks is and what motivated you to build it?
  • How does Healthchecks compare with other cron monitoring projects such as Cronitor or Dead Man’s Snitch?
  • Your pricing on the hosted service for Healthchecks.io is quite generous so I’m curious how you arrived at that cost structure and whether it has proven to be profitable for you?
  • How is Healthchecks functionality implemented and how has the design evolved since you began working on and using it?
  • What have been some of the most challenging aspects of working on Healthchecks and managing the hosted version?
  • For someone who wants to run their own instance of the service what are the steps and services involved?
  • What are some of the most interesting or unusual uses of Healtchecks that you are aware of?
  • Given that Healthchecks is intended to be used as part of an operations management and alerting system, what are the considerations that users should be aware of when deploying it in a highly available configuration?
  • What improvements or features do you have planned for the future of Healthchecks?

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The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA