Monitoring for your nightly backups, weekly reports, cron jobs and background tasks.

Make HTTP requests to the Ping URL at regular intervals. When the URL is not pinged on time, farmerswife checks will send you an alert. You can monitor any service that can make HTTP requests or send emails.

farmerswife checks creates unique Ping URLs like this one:

# m h dom mon dow command
  8 6 *   *   *   /home/user/backup.sh && curl -fsS --retry 3 https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47 > /dev/null

# using curl:
# (make sure it is installed on your system!)
curl --retry 3 https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47

# using wget:
wget https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47 -O /dev/null

# urllib with python 3.x:
import urllib.request
urllib.request.urlopen("https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47")

# urllib with python 2.x:
import urllib
urllib.urlopen("https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47")

# using requests:
import requests
requests.get("https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47")

require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse('https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47'))

var https = require('https');
https.get("https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47");

file_get_contents('https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47');

using (var client = new System.Net.WebClient())
{
       client.DownloadString("https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47");
}

// the server returns appropriate CORS headers so cross-domain AJAX requests should work:
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open('GET', 'https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47', true);
xhr.send(null);

# inside a PowerShell script:
Invoke-RestMethod https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47

# Without an underlying script, passing the command to PowerShell directly:
powershell.exe -command &{Invoke-RestMethod https://hc.farmerswife.com/ping/03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47}

As an alternative to HTTP and HTTPS requests, you can "ping" this check by sending an email message to 03d9b1d9-12b0-466e-8855-e6166e469c47@hc.farmerswife.com

A quick peek of what's inside:

A list of your checks, one for each Cron job, daemon or periodically running task you want to monitor.

Give names and assign tags to your checks to easily recognize them later.

Tap on the integration icons to toggle them on and off.

Adjust Period and Grace time to match the periodicity and duration of your tasks.

Each check has configurable Period and Grace Time parameters. Depending on these parameters and time since the last ping, the check is in one of the following states:

	New. A check that has been created, but has not received any pings yet.
	Up. Time since last ping has not exceeded Period.
	Late. Time since last ping has exceeded Period, but has not yet exceeded Period + Grace.
	Down. Time since last ping has exceeded Period + Grace. When check goes from "Late" to "Down", farmerswife checks sends you a notification.

Alternatively, you can define the expected ping dates and times using a cron expression. See Cron Syntax Cheatsheet for the supported syntax features.

Grace Time specifies how "late" a ping can be before you will be alerted. Set it to be a little above the expected duration of your cron job.

You can add a longer, free-form description to each check. Leave notes and pointers for yourself and for your team.

You can also see the log of received pings and sent "Down" notifications.

farmerswife checks provides status badges for each of the tags you have used. Additionally, the "farmerswife checks" badge shows the overall status of all checks in your account.

The badges have public, but hard-to-guess URLs. You can use them in your READMEs, dashboards or status pages.

Integrations
Set up additional ways to get notified:

Email

SMS

Webhooks

Slack
Chat

PagerDuty
Incident Management

VictorOps
Incident Management

OpsGenie
Incident Management

PagerTree
Incident Management

Pager Team
Incident Management

Trello
Project Management

What Can I Monitor With farmerswife checks?

Cron Jobs

farmerswife checks monitoring is a great fit for cron jobs and cron-like systems (systemd timers, Jenkins build jobs, Windows Scheduled Tasks, wp-cron, uwsgi cron-like interface, Heroku Scheduler, ...). A failed cron job often has no immediate visible consequences, and can go unnoticed for a long time.

Specific examples:

Filesystem backups
Database backups
Daily, weekly, monthly report emails
SSL renewals
Business data import and sync
Antivirus scans
Dynamic DNS updates

Processes, Services, Servers

farmerswife checks monitoring can be used for lightweight server monitoring: ensuring a particular system service, or the server as a whole is alive and healthy. Write a shell script that checks for a specific condition, and pings farmerswife checks if successful. Run the shell script regularly.

Specific examples:

Check a specific docker container is running
Check a specific application process is running
Check database replication lag
Check system resources: free disk, free RAM, ...
Send simple, unconditional "I'm alive" messages from your server (or your NAS, router, Raspberry Pi, ...)

Monitoring for your nightly backups, weekly reports, cron jobs and background tasks.

farmerswife checks creates unique Ping URLs like this one:

A quick peek of what's inside:

Integrations Set up additional ways to get notified:

Email

SMS

Webhooks

SlackChat

PagerDutyIncident Management

VictorOpsIncident Management

OpsGenieIncident Management

PagerTreeIncident Management

Pager Team Incident Management

TrelloProject Management