Getting started
Create your first monitor, report a run and verify that alerts reach you.
This takes about five minutes. You will create a monitor, connect a job and send a test failure to confirm alerts reach you.
Watching a website rather than a job? Choose Website when you create the monitor and give it the URL. There is nothing to wire up. See Website monitors.
1. Create a monitor
Sign in, open a project and add a monitor. It needs two things:
- A schedule: a cron expression, or a fixed interval. This is when Rippler expects the ping, so it should match the job's real schedule.
- A grace duration: how late a ping may be before it counts as missed. Set it a little above the job's longest normal run time, so a slow run does not alert. See schedules and grace.
The monitor starts as new: created, never pinged. It will not alert in that state.
2. Add the ping to your job
The monitor's page shows its ping URL and paste-ready snippets. The simplest integration is one call when the job finishes:
curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 5 -o /dev/null https://api.rippler.io/ping/<pingID>/For a cron job, that goes in your own crontab, via crontab -e:
0 3 * * * /path/to/your-job.sh && curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 5 -o /dev/null "https://api.rippler.io/ping/<pingID>/"That line is a user crontab line. /etc/crontab is a different format — it needs a user
column after the schedule, and without one cron rejects the file and silently ignores every job
in it, including ones that were already there. See
troubleshooting.
Pinging /start/ first gives you a duration and an immediate failure report,
instead of waiting for the next ping to go missing:
curl … /ping/<pingID>/start/ # before the work
curl … /ping/<pingID>/ # it worked
curl … /ping/<pingID>/fail/ # it did notThe pings reference covers the URL shapes and their parameters.
3. Watch it report
Run the job by hand, or wait for its next scheduled run. The monitor goes to up,
the ping count increases, and the run appears under Logs.
If nothing arrives, the job is usually fine and the ping is not. Troubleshooting lists the usual reasons.
4. Break it on purpose
Send a failure by hand:
curl -fsS -m 10 -o /dev/null "https://api.rippler.io/ping/<pingID>/fail/"The monitor goes down, and an alert goes to everyone on the team who has alert
emails switched on. This confirms the alert reaches the right address before a
real outage.
Send a success ping to clear it. A recovery alert follows the same way.
Next steps
- Have a lot of cron jobs already?
rippler syncreads your crontab, creates a monitor for every job that does not have one, and rewrites those lines to report themselves. - Noisy job that recovers by itself? Raise its failure tolerance instead of turning the monitor off.
- Working with a team? Alerts go to every member, and each person controls whether they receive them.