What online sites are available to help organize redundant error/cron emails?

Question

I feel like I saw a site somewhere that would "dedupe" error messages commonly sent from frameworks like Django or cron errors. I cannot seem to re-find the site however. Have people heard of online tools like this that help wade through the hundreds of emails applications can possibly send at times?

UPDATE: I realize this may sound like a ServerFault question, but I think this online service is mostly used by people writing apps in Django and/or other frameworks. Anyone?

Answer 1

I suggest to take a look at AlertGrid. Once you integrate with this service you will be able to set some filtering rules and configure automatically trigerred notification actions (email/sms/phone). Thanks to this you'll receive only important notifications and for those really critical you can set 'more instant' alerts (SMS or phone).

In fact we are already use this for some scenarios you've mentioned:

1. for critical cron job executed once a minute we monitor some important parameters related to this taks and send proper notififcations when something requires attention.
2. for the same cron job we check if we received 'heartbeat' (Signal) in some expected time period. If not it means that something really bad happened, so we set SMS action for this case.

Integrating AlertGrid to handle alerts for application errors in Django is quite simple (adding middleware that will send Signal to AlertGrid on exception with error message and then built some rules like 'if message contains critical -> send sms'. This should do the trick. Of course you can set create many notification rules and use same notification rule for many apps).

We work on some examples how to integrate AlertGrid with Django, Rails and other frameworks. Examples should arrive soon in documentation section of AlertGrid.

(I'm a developer in AlertGrid team)