The primary intended use, in the case of Healthchecks.io, is to monitor the regularly running tasks on servers, such as cron jobs. However, the “alert me if X doesn’t happen on time” functionality can be useful in many other contexts too. One of the quirkier ways I’ve been personally using Healthchecks.io is to help my progress towards the Sojourner medal in Ingress.
Ingress is a location-based, augmented-reality game. It is a predecessor of Pokemon GO, and is made by the same company. In Ingress, players visit physical points of interest (“portals”) and perform various in-game actions on them. One of the gamification features in Ingress is Medals. Medals are awarded to players as they reach set milestones. For example, the “Trekker” medal is awarded for walking a long distance while playing Ingress:
Another medal in Ingress is Sojourner. For the Sojourner medal, the player must visit and “hack” portals in consecutive 24 hour periods:
The black Sojourner medal is notoriously hard to obtain. If the player misses their 24 hour window, the current hacking streak resets to zero, and they have to start from scratch. The player must keep track of “When was my last hack? How much time do I have left?” day in day out. My own highest hacking streak is 233 days. Everything was going well until one day I forgot to go outside and do my “daily hack” on time. And just like that, I was back to square one!
After a period of “I’m never doing this again!”, I started another attempt. This time I was also using Healthchecks.io to keep track of how much time I have left each day and to remind me when the time is about to run out. Here’s how this works: I’ve set up a check on Healthchecks.io with a period of 20 hours:
For notifications, I’m using Pushover with the “emergency” priority: if the “Daily Hack” check doesn’t get pinged at least every 20 hours, my phone will get a notification. The “emergency” priority causes the notification to be repeated every 5 minutes until it is acknowledged. The emergency notifications also ignore the “Do Not Disturb” mode on the phone.
I will not be reverse engineering the Ingress mobile app, so I also need a convenient way to manually send HTTP requests to the “Daily Hack” check when I’m returning home from playing. I’ve found the HTTP Shortcuts Android app and its home screen widget useful for that.
I also bought an AWS IoT button and stuck it on the inside of my apartment’s front door. When passing the door, I can press the button, which triggers a Lambda function, which then pings Healthchecks.io. Here is a quick demonstration. In practice, I am using the phone’s home screen widget most of the time, but this was a good excuse to play around with the AWS IoT button.
And that is all! Whenever 20 hours pass without a ping to Healthchecks.io, my phone then sounds notifications every 5 minutes. At this point, I still have 4 hours left to go out and hack a portal. I don’t silence the notifications until the hack is done–just to be safe and stay “motivated” by the annoying notifications. This setup has been working well for me so far. My current hacking streak is 201 days and counting. Fingers crossed!
Do you also have found an unconventional or creative use for Healthchecks.io? Please let me know via Twitter or email!
Pēteris,
Healthchecks.io