The Nanny was developed at Metaweb Technologies to greatly increase the reliability and traceability of the various Freebase.com production services.

Its feature set includes:

• Auto-daemonisation with optional automatic restart. One nanny process can support multiple distinct children.

• Rotated logging of child's standard IO streams and events such as starts, stops and restarts.

• Intelligent stopping of children. SIGTERM at first, then will try a SIGKILL if that doesn't work.

• In-built HTTP server for logs and statistics with both humanly-readable and machine-readable JSON output.

• Timed or periodic operation support. Similar conceptually to cron, but randomises the start time to avoid machines all running the operation at exactly the same time.