Heroku Buildpack for Dead Man's Snitch

Dead Man's Snitch is a monitoring service for Heroku Scheduler, cron jobs, and other scheduled tasks. We let you know when your jobs fail or they fail to run.

Field Agent is our custom monitoring agent that makes it easy to add error alerting and gain access to the logs when a job fails.

Getting Started

To get started, add this buildpack to the Heroku application you plan to monitor. You will then need to build a new slug by pushing a change to the application. Changing configuration or restarting the dynos is not enough to trigger a new slug to be built, you will need to push a new commit.

$ heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/deadmanssnitch/heroku-buildpack-dms

Setup Dead Man's Snitch

If you haven't already, you will want to add Dead Man's Snitch as an add-on to your application. The free plan offers basic alerting for when jobs fail to run.

heroku addons:create deadmanssnitch

Next, open the Dead Man's Snitch interface, enter your name and the email address where alerts should be sent, then create your first Snitch. Give it a name that describes what you will be monitoring.

heroku addons:open deadmanssnitch

To get access to error alerting and failure log output you will need to upgrade to our Surveillance Van plan

heroku addons:upgrade deadmanssnitch:surveillance-van

Configure Heroku Scheduler

$ heroku addons:open scheduler

This buildpack provides a new command (dms) that will be added to PATH that you will use to help run your jobs. It wraps your jobs, gathers metrics and logs, then radios the information back to Dead Man's Snitch.

You will need the token of the Snitch you created earlier. You prepend dms and the token before your job in Heroku Scheduler.

For example, if your job was rake stripe:update and your Snitch's token was c2354d53d2 the
command would become:

dms c2354d53d2 rake stripe:update