How To Get Alerts When a Sidekiq Instance Goes Down
For those of us who use the popular distributed job queueing system Sidekiq, it’s a common problem: a Sidekiq instance containing a pool of workers dies, and the only way you find out about the problem is by checking the Sidekiq dashboard and seeing that you’ve got a ton of jobs backed up and fewer busy workers than expected. Luckily, there’s an easy way to get email alerts when one of your instances goes down, using Dead Man’s Snitch and a little bit of code inspired by the sidekiq\_snitch gem.
Scheduling Crowd-Sourced Entropy with Webhooks
I love writing gems. Lately, I’ve been particularly interested in tackling the big, important problems in math, like how can a computer generate a truly random number. I took this challenge head-on when I developed the fair_dice_roll gem.
How to Get Your Server to Email You After it Fails
Running routine tasks like a server health check often sends an email every time it returns healthy. Overtime, they’re easy to ignore. But, what you really need to know is when these email stop sending. Using a new Dead Man’s Snitch feature, you can now easily monitor when an email isn’t sent and DMS will alert you.
A Not-So-Bad-Reminder to Blog More
Reminding and motivating your team to write blog posts can be hard. Constantly nagging them won’t help much either. With a slightly more constructive approach, we hope to increase our blog posting to once per week by scheduling months in advance and sending a simple reminder if we get off track using this quick and automated “Recipe.”
Background Job Monitoring for Atheists
I’m a Rails developer but I’m not much of an Ops guy. So when it comes to server monitoring, I want a simpler solution than God. God is a “Process Monitoring Framework in Ruby” and while I know it’s awesome, sometimes it’s not quick and dirty enough for my liking.
