I recently found out Travis CI is ending its free-for-opensource offering, and looked at the alternatives. I recently got badly burned by giving an external CI service access to my repositories, so I am now wary of giving any service any access to important accounts. Github Actions, being a part of Github, therefore looked attractive to me. I had no experience with Github Actions going in. I have now spent maybe 4 hours total tinkering with it.

The Healthchecks.io system status page at status.healthchecks.io recently received a revamp. Here are my notes on the new version. First up, the components section shows the current and historic status of components: Dashboard shows the status of the main website, healthchecks.io. “Operational” state here means the website responds to HTTP requests, and has a working connection to the PostgreSQL database.

If you are looking for a hosted cron job monitoring service, good news: there many options to choose from! In this post I’m comparing a selection of the more popular ones: Cronitor, Healthchecks.io, Cronhub, Site24x7, CronAlarm, PushMon and Dead Man’s Snitch. How I picked the services for comparison: I searched for “cron monitoring” on Google and picked the top results in their order of appearance. I was looking specifically for hosted, SaaS-style services.

One class of support requests I get at Healthchecks.io is about occasional failed HTTP requests to ping endpoints (hc-ping.com and hchk.io). Following an investigation, the conclusion often is that the failed requests are caused by a packet loss somewhere along the path from the client to the server. The problem starts and ends seemingly at random, presumably as network operators fix failing equipment or change the routing rules.

For a monitoring service, uptime and reliability is of course a critical feature: customers are placing trust in the service to detect problems and deliver timely and accurate alerts. While I cannot guarantee that Healthchecks.io will absolutely never let you down, I can offer transparency on how it is currently being hosted and operated.

The primary intended use, in the case of Healthchecks.io, is to monitor the regularly running tasks on servers, such as cron jobs. However, the “alert me if X doesn’t happen on time” functionality can be useful in many other contexts too. One of the quirkier ways I’ve been personally using Healthchecks.io is to help my progress towards the Sojourner medal in Ingress.

If your Healthchecks account is growing and is getting a little hard to manage, Healthchecks.io has a new feature for you: Projects. Use Projects to organize your monitoring dashboards, to have finer-grained team and API access controls, and to simplify your check-integration mapping.

I’ve been receiving multiple user reports that Gmail shows a red “This message seems dangerous” banner above some of the emails sent by Healthchecks.io. I’ve even seen some myself.

First, a TL;DR: on how much money I’m making. Healthchecks.io has around 90 paying customers, and the monthly revenue is a little above $700/mo. The bulk of that goes back into running costs.

In this article I will look at the current hosting setup of healthchecks.io, how it has evolved during the past two years, and what challenges I faced running this small but lively service.