Say you run a daily database backup script. How do you make sure it runs successfully in the background? You only want to get notified if there’s an issue. You want something easy to setup and use. There’s a ton of website monitoring services out there, but nothing for behind the firewall processes, scripts, jobs and batches.
You can implement your own monitoring system, which will probably take longer to write than the backup script itself. You need to make sure the machine is up and running. You need to make sure cron or task scheduler is working fine. You need to make sure the network is up. You need to make sure your SMTP server is up. If you have a couple of cron jobs, you will need to do this for each one. Some might suggest Nagios, but now we have a whole monitoring system to be implemented for a few lines of shell scripting. So what normally happens is you send an email every time, which you will tend to ignore after some time, or just manually check it, which you will eventually forget. Now if your database backup normally runs and completes before 3 AM, you will only know of issues when you check your email, which normally is at 8 AM at the earliest.
We wanted an easy solution to this problem. We wanted a Pingdom for scripts and cron jobs. PushMon is the answer. All you need to is 2 minutes to sign up and create a PushMon URL with a daily schedule. You then take this URL, access it when your script succesfully ends, and that’s it. PushMon will expect a “ping” from your script on a daily basis. If it doesn’t hear from your script because it never ran or the backup failed, you will get notified by email, SMS, phone, IM or Twitter. PushMon also has an advanced but easy to use scheduling feature. Using the schedule “by 3 AM every day”, you will get alerted at 3 AM if the script hasn’t accessed the URL at that time. No need to wait for someone to come in and check emails at 8 AM.
You can request for an invite during this beta period at http://www.pushmon.com.