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.