July 2024 update

July 7, 2024

We are thrilled to announce a significant update to iHook, designed to enhance user experience and streamline your task scheduling and management processes. This update brings a set of new features and improvements that we believe will make your workflow smoother and more efficient. Here’s what’s new:

Helper for Cron Expression Explanation

One of the most requested features by our users is now available: a new helper that translates cron expressions into human-readable language. Cron expressions can often be confusing, especially for those who are not familiar with the syntax. With this new helper, you can simply input your cron expression, and it will provide an easy-to-understand explanation of what the expression means. This tool will help ensure that your scheduled tasks run exactly when you expect them to, reducing errors and enhancing productivity.

cron-expression-helper

Support for 5-Field Cron Expressions

We have added support for 5-field cron expressions, which are widely used and familiar to many users. The 5-field format (minute, hour, day of the month, month, day of the week) is a common standard, and our support for this format makes it easier for users to create and manage their cron jobs without having to adjust to a different format. This update ensures compatibility and ease of use for those who rely on the traditional 5-field cron syntax.

For more information about how 5-field cron expression works, please see here.

Pruning of Non-Meaningful User-Created Tasks

To optimize system performance and reduce unnecessary clutter, iHook will now prune user-created tasks that are determined to be non-meaningful. For example, tasks that repeatedly make HTTP requests to sites like Facebook.com or Google.com without performing any significant actions or parsing will be deactivated. This is to help maintain a clean and efficient task management system, ensuring that only meaningful and productive tasks are executed.

Thank You

We believe these updates will significantly improve your experience with iHook, making it easier to create, understand, and manage your scheduled tasks. As always, we value your feedback and are committed to continuously enhancing our product to meet your needs.

Thank you for choosing iHook, and we look forward to bringing you more exciting updates in the future.

Happy Scheduling!

March 2023 update

March 23, 2023

Team iHook

Chart for response body text

If the entire response body is a numeric value, users can use this option to draw a time chart for recent task executions.

response-body-text

For more information about how Task History Chart works, please see here.

Email validation for receiver email notification

Receivers will now only allow emails to be sent to verified email addresses. This ensures that sensitive information is not sent to an incorrect or malicious email address, and also helps our system prevent email fraud and phishing attacks.

receiver-email-verification

Thank You

Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoy our product and please feel free to send your feedback to us at [email protected]!

August 2022 Update

August 21, 2022

Team iHook

Multiple condition support

We are excited to announce multiple condition support for task notifications! You can create additional conditions by clicking the +ADD button below the default notification condition. When multiple conditions are configured, a notification will only be sent when all the conditions are met. This allows you to create more fine-grained rules about when to trigger a notification.

multiple-conditions

With this change, the default notification message will include all the evaluated condition values in a list. If you want to show a specific condition's evaluated value in your notification messages, you may do this by providing an index to the template variable, e.g. ${condition.evaluatedSourceValue[0]}.

Task execution history bug fix

We fixed an issue where the task execution history page shows inaccurate task metadata such as request URI and request method after these attributes are updated for a task.

Thank You

Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoy our product and please feel free to send your feedback to us at [email protected]!

May 2022 Update

May 4, 2022

Team iHook

Search bar for task list

We added a search bar on the task list page. Tasks will be returned if the search keyword matches or partially matches a task's name or URL. This will help you locate a task faster.

Auto disable tasks if notification delivery failed 5 times in a row

We added an auto disable mechanism if a task's notification delivery failed 5 times in a row.

For example, if a task is configured to notify a Slack channel when certain conditions are met, and that Slack channel no longer exist, after 5 failed attempt to send the Slack message, the task will be automatically disabled, and the admin will receive an email regarding the disablement.

We believe this mechanism will help users identify and fix problematic notifications earlier.

Thank You

Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoy our product and please feel free to send your feedback to us at [email protected]! May the 4th be with you!

September 2021 Update

September 13, 2021

Team iHook

One-time task

With this feature, you can create tasks that will execute only once at a certain time. You no longer have to achieve this by setting up a recurring schedule task and manually disable it after the first execution.

one-time-schedule

Task notification email address selection

Previously for iHook tasks, users can send email notifications to any email address by filling a text box in the notification settings page without any verification.

Now you need to pick an address from a list that contains all emails that have been verified. This saves you time to enter the address manually, and eliminates the chance for a typo. This also protects our product from being abused by malicious users who try to send spam emails to targeted recipients.

By default, the email that is verified during registration will be available in the list. If you want to send a notification to a new address, you need to verify it by going through a verification process.

email-selection-list

Lazy polling for task and receiver history

When viewing task execution history and receiver execution history, iHook UI automatically polls the execution data from the backend every couple of seconds. Previously it fetches all the data from the last 10 executions, which could be a huge amount of data.

Now, this logic is improved by only fetching the entries that is not present in the UI, which dramatically reduces the amount of data that needs to be fetched.

This change also allows us to do more frequent polling since each polling requires much less network resource. You should be able to see your execution info gets refreshed twice as fast now.

Roadblock for task deactivation

iHook automatically deactivates tasks that failed to execute 3 times in a row. In rare cases, there might be system-level issue that causes a large number of tasks to fail consistently. For example, the servers that host our service might experience network issues, which will result in all task executions to fail.

In such cases, while we should address the root cause of such infrastructure issues as soon as possible, we also want to prevent the tasks from being deactivated by the system unexpectedly.

So we rolled out a roadblock feature - if the system deactivated more than 20% of all active tasks for the past 30 minutes, we will disable the task auto deactivation feature until we manually re-enable the feature.

We hope the roadblock feature never needs to be used :)

Thank You

Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoy our product and please feel free to send your feedback to us at [email protected]!

May 2021 Update

May 28, 2021

Team iHook

Updated sign-in and sign-up page

We've been using Okta as our identity provider to manage sign-in and sign-up flows. It had been working great for the past 2 years - the integration could be set up within a couple of hours, and we don't have to worry about implementing and maintain all those sign-in, sign-up, password recovery flows. And it did a great job protecting iHook against malicious bot from registering zombie users.

However, due to the recent pricing change, we've decided that Okta is no longer an economic choice for iHook, and we spent 1 month rolling out our in-house authentication solution.

The new sign-in pages look pretty much the same as before, and you may continue to use your existing credentials (password or Google account) to log into iHook. Compared to the sign-in experience managed by Okta, the new pages are purely HTML-based without any Javascript logic. This reduces the static assets that need to be loaded by your browser and you may expect a faster page loading speed.

We did notice an increase in spam bot registration after the rollout. In response, we deployed a third-party security solution to help mitigate such attacks. So far this has been working well and we've seen a dramatic drop in attack for the last 2 weeks. Since the bot detection is automatic, there's a chance that legit traffic is blocked by the security module, if so please don't hesitate to contact our support team at [email protected]. We'll continue monitoring the site traffic to ensure a smooth site visiting experience.

Custom Slack message support for task notifications

We added support to customize Slack notification messages for iHook tasks. This had been supported for iHook receivers from day one, now it's available for iHook tasks as well. With this feature, you can provide more details when your task's Slack notifications are triggered. Similar to Email and SMS notification messages, you can add template variables such as evaluated condition value and response code. For more information, see our doc page.

slack-template-support

HTTP notification status in execution history

For HTTP notifications, we added more details about the notification delivery status, including request headers, request body, response code, response headers, and response body. With this info, troubleshoot HTTP notifications would be easier.

Thank You

Thank you for reading! And thank you for your support of iHook! For any feedback, please feel free to contact us at [email protected]! Have a great weekend!

February 2021 Update

February 27, 2021

Team iHook

iHook Receiver

We are excited to announce our latest product, iHook Receiver! A receiver provides an iHook hosted API endpoint to receive HTTP requests from external resources, and can send email/Slack notifications whenever those requests are triggered.

receiver

Receiver is a handy tool to accept webhooks from web services such as SendGrid and Okta, and notify you with the data of your interest. You can use JSON path expression to process and filter webhook request data that is sent to your receiver.

Free plan users can create up to 10 receivers. Each receiver comes with a 20 per minute rate limit for incoming requests. For more details about how to set up a receiver, please take a look at our quick start doc.

Notification status under Task History

We added the Notification Status section for each task execution detail under the history page. With this enhancement, users will have better knowledge about their notification condition evaluation results and notification delivery results for each task execution:

notification-status

Task history loading performance improvement

We reduced the task execution items per page from 20 to 10. This will improve the task history page's loading speed, especially for tasks with larger response body.

Thank You

Thank you for reading! We look forward to your feedback about our latest product Receiver. Please feel free to contact us at [email protected]! Have a great weekend!

December 2020 Update

January 14, 2021

Team iHook

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you are all doing well. It's time for another product update.

New daily email usage limit

To prevent email service abuse, we updated the email quota for free plan accounts: 20 emails per 24-hour period.

When the email quota is reached, the related task will be disabled and an email notification will be sent to your primary email address that is provided during registration.

You may re-enable the task once your quota becomes available again - the sending limit is applied over a rolling 24-hour period, and your quota will be fully renewed after 24 hours. To help you monitor the usage, we rolled out a usage section on the account page, you can check it out here.

We feel like the new quota should be sufficient for regular use cases since too many emails sent during a short period would become noisy anyway. We’ll keep trying to understand our users' email usage patterns and iterate on the quota plan so that our free plan users don't get too annoyed by task disablement due to email overuse.

Task execution error reminder

One pain point of our users is that when their task notifications failed to deliver (e.g. due to misconfigured condition rule, or incorrect delivery email address), it's hard for them to notice the failure, since the task execution was marked as COMPLETED, and they have to expand the task execution detail, and look at the Errors section for any errors.

Now when such failure occurs, the task execution will be marked as FAILED, so it's easier for users to notice the failure without having to expand the execution detail.

On top of that, when a notification delivery failed due to a misconfigured notification condition 5 times in a row, the task will be disabled and an email notification will be sent to your primary email address. We think that a task with a misconfigured notification is incomplete, and disabling the task would help force users to correct their notification setup.

Task disable email notification enhancement

We enhanced the task disablement email notification. Now each email will show detail about the reason for the disablement, such as email/SMS usage exceeds the limit, invalid notification condition, or the HTTP task's response body exceed the limit. This will help users troubleshoot their task setup and help them fix the issue and re-enable the task faster.

New shortcuts

To make task editing experience more smooth, we now support using Esc key to cancel task edits. See here for a full list of shortcuts we supported.

Thank You

Thank you for reading! As always, if you have any feedback on our product and features, please contact us at [email protected], we look forward to hearing from you! Happy New Year!

October 2020 Update

October 31, 2020

Team iHook

Happy Halloween! Although Halloween will be different than usual this year, I hope you enjoy the holiday with family and friends while staying safe. Here are the product updates for October.

Sorting options for task list

We added sorting support for the task list page. For the business plan, people can create dozens of tasks, and sometimes it's hard to find a task in the list since they are sorted by created date in descending order.

With the new sorting options, in addition to the current sort by created date option, you can sort by task name and last opened date. This will help you organize your tasks. For example, if you visit some tasks more frequently than other tasks to review the execution history, you may find sorting by Last opened at helpful.

blog-oct-2020-sort

Option to allow insecure server certificates

Before this change, iHook's requests to remote HTTP resources with invalid certificates would end up in FAIL state, with invalid certificate error shown in the task execution detail section under the History tab.

We added an advanced option under the Request Settings section to allow such requests to succeed. While it's a best practice to configure valid SSL certificates for production web resources, you may still need to issue requests to HTTP endpoints where a secure certificate is not readily available. In such cases, you may find this new setting helpful.

blog-oct-2020-bad-cert

Schedule delay for interval-based tasks

When tasks are scheduled to execute in a fixed interval such as every 1 hour, each execution may experience a few seconds delay. Such delay can add up with time and the task schedule may experience a noticeable drift from its original schedule.

The issue was caused by a delay in scanning logic that looks for ready-to-run tasks, in combination with the fact that such delay was included when calculating the next execution date. This issue had been fixed and you should now expect no more than 1 second delay for your task executions across all schedule modes (interval-based and cron-based), with the drift behavior eliminated.

Thank You

Thank you for reading! Our goal is to keep improving our product to provide you a better user experience for scheduling HTTP requests while maintaining our service availability and reliability. This includes minimizing regression along the way by enforcing comprehensive quality control coverage. As always, if you have any feedback on our product and features, please contact us at [email protected], we look forward to hearing from you!

September 2020 Update

October 1, 2020

Team iHook

History Chart

We updated the history chart UI with a dropdown list to make it easier for users to select common metrics such as response time and status code. Of course, you can select the response body option in the dropdown, where a search box will appear for you to draw charts for certain properties from the response body.

This change makes it easier for new users to explore the feature and also makes the chart section more concise. And don't forget that you can add bookmarks for your charts for easy future access. For more details, please see our doc page.

Response Time Metrics:

blog-september-2020-new-chart-response-time

Response Body Property Metrics:

blog-september-2020-new-chart-response-body

Follow HTTP Redirect

On the task execution front, we added a setting to allow tasks to automatically follow HTTP redirect when issuing a POST request. Before this enhancement, iHook only follows redirects for non POST requests, as specified in HTTP RFC 2616. Now you can relax the restriction by enabling the task setting under the Advanced Option section.

blog-september-2020-advanced-options

HTTP Request Header Override

When iHook sends HTTP requests, a couple of headers such as User-Agent and Accept are added by default to maximize the chance for a request to succeed (You can inspect each request's header information under the History section).

Now you can override those pre-defined header values. For example, you can assign a browser User-Agent value such as Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.95 Safari/537.11 to better simulate browser requests. The override will be case insensitive.

Auto Disabling

If a task could not receive a response from the remote side after 15 seconds, and if this happens 3 times in a row, iHook would disable the task and notify you via email. Now we are extending this behavior for tasks with 4xx and 5xx response status code.

We realize that most users would end up with a 2xx status code if their HTTP requests were to achieve something meaningful. With this change, it would allow us to better allocate our task scheduling resource and notify users when requests receive bad status code.

Surely some users would still be interested in 4xx and 5xx status code. To avoid auto disabling, you can create notification rules that check for status code. That way we would know that you are making a conscious decision about the expected HTTP response status code for a task. As long as such rules are present, no auto disabling would occur on 4xx and 5xx status code.

Thank You

Thank you for reading and thank you for your continued support for iHook! As always, if you have any feedback on our product and features, please contact us at [email protected], we look forward to hearing from you!