Shortly after launching Cronitor.io, (a dead-simple SaaS solution for monitoring cron jobs), we noticed a large number of tracking events coming from a specific user -- 3000x more than we normally see after a user starts monitoring a job.

The normal use case is to curl your tracking URL at the end of your crontab line, so seeing 25k events coming in over 48 hours clued us in that Cronitor was being used for something different than we expected.

Turns out, the user needed to do a big one-time batch processing of thousands of records and wanted to keep track of how many were done, and wanted to be alerted when the process was complete. By curling his tracking URL at the end of his event loop, he could leave behind his workstation and trust that he would be notified when the batch was done.

(If you want to know a little more about Cronitor, check out an awesome blog post from my co-founder, The First Paying Customer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8020980)