I built CronAlarm (https://www.cronalarm.com) to solve a problem I was having at my primary job. I had several dozen cron jobs / scheduled tasks that ran at various times of the day, multiple times of the day, and across a range of servers. It became a little unwieldy to adequately monitor and I too often didn't know anything was wrong until somebody complained. So I built an internal tool to centralize the results of the jobs and to send me alerts when a problem was detected.
There are other cron monitoring tools out there, but at the time I didn't realize that. I didn't even look for one before building my own, actually. After stumbling across another option online one day, I thought to myself that if somebody was willing to pay for such a service, why not put my own out there? I thought mine was/is different enough from the others that it may be a compelling alternative to existing solutions. Thus, CronAlarm was born.
I'm rebuilding the API and admin section for CronAlarm - https://www.cronalarm.com - a cron job / scheduled task monitoring platform. The purpose of the rewrite is for paving the way for a native mobile app. Also working on adding Slack integrations as well.
We had a large number of cron jobs at my regular employer that ran across multiple servers and applications. Things started to get a bit unwieldy and insight into any issues was negligible, so I built a cron job monitoring tool for internal use. Eventually I figured that if we found it useful maybe others would too. So I looked around and realized there were a few others already in existence that seemed to be making money. Mine offered some features the others didn't so I figured I'd go for it. It's been a lot of fun.
My main job requires a ridiculous amount of file and data transfers that are mostly scheduled to run during off-peak hours. I needed a way to centralize the results of these jobs in order to keep tabs on things. I built this as an in-house tool and then discovered a few services already existed for this. I thought my solution offered some things these others didn't, and if somebody was paying these other services I might have some success as well. It's been a lot of fun, and if anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear them.
I started out in system administration and network engineering before switching to programming. I once had a dream that my cigarette needed an IP address before I could smoke it.
Thanks! I built this for myself a while back, before I knew any alternatives existed. When I found out about dead mans snitch I figured I might as well build out CronAlarm for others to use as well. Especially since I thought mine was better ;-)
A platform for monitoring cron jobs and scheduled tasks. Nobody here is getting rich from it, but it is profitable and brings in some extra cash which is nice.
What problems do you have, and can you solve them? If so, there is your idea. Chances are if you are having a problem, others are too. And if there is something similar out there already, that's good news! It means your market is validated. Put your own spin on it, add some new/different features that are not offered by your competition, and give a go.
As for making sure that the time you put in is going to bring in money, well, nobody can be sure of that. However, as I said before, if you are solving a problem there is a good chance others will pay for it. If nothing else, if you solve your own problem then it was probably time well spent regardless.