Simple and Effective Cron Job Monitoring

We notify you when your nightly backups, weekly reports, cron jobs, and scheduled tasks don't run on time.

How to monitor any background job:

  1. On Healthchecks.io, generate a unique ping URL for your background job.

  2. Update your job to send an HTTP request to the ping URL every time the job runs.

  3. When your job does not ping Healthchecks.io on time, Healthchecks.io alerts you!

Monitor 20 cron jobs for free. No credit card required.

Start Monitoring

A quick peek of what's inside:

My Checks page

Live-updating Dashboard

A list of your checks, one for each Cron job, daemon or scheduled task you want to monitor.

Give names and assign tags to your checks to easily recognize them later.

Tap on the integration icons to toggle them on and off.

Adjust Period and Grace time to match the periodicity and duration of your tasks.

Period/Grace Time dialog

Simple Configuration

Each check has configurable Period and Grace Time parameters. Depending on these parameters and time since the last ping, the check is in one of the following states:
New. A check that has been created, but has not received any pings yet.
Up. The time since the last ping has not exceeded Period.
Late. The time since the last ping has exceeded Period, but has not yet exceeded Period + Grace.
Down. The time since the last ping has exceeded Period + Grace. When a check goes from "Late" to "Down", Healthchecks.io sends you a notification.
Cron dialog

Cron Expression Support

Alternatively, you can define the expected ping dates and times using a cron expression. See Cron Syntax Cheatsheet for the supported syntax features.

Grace Time specifies how "late" a ping can be before you are alerted. You should set it to be a little above the expected duration of your cron job.

Details Page

Details and Event Log

You can add a longer, free-form description to each check. Leave notes and pointers for yourself and your team.

You can also see the log of received pings and sent "Down" notifications.

Details Page

Public Status Badges

Healthchecks.io provides status badges for each of the tags you have used. Additionally, the "Healthchecks.io" badge shows the overall status of all checks in your account.

The badges have public but hard-to-guess URLs. You can use them in your READMEs, dashboards, or status pages.

Integrations
Set up multiple ways to get notified:

Email
 

Webhooks
 

Discord
Chat

Gotify
Push Notifications

Matrix
Chat

Microsoft Teams
Chat

ntfy
Push Notifications

Opsgenie
Incident Management

PagerTree
Incident Management

Phone Call
 

Pushbullet
Push Notifications

Signal
Chat

SMS
 

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Spike.sh
Incident Management

Trello
Project Management

Splunk On-Call
Incident Management

WhatsApp
Chat

Zulip
Chat

Healthchecks.io

What Can I Monitor With Healthchecks.io?

Cron Jobs

Healthchecks.io monitoring is a perfect fit for monitoring cron jobs (see guide) and cron-like systems: systemd timers, Jenkins build jobs, Windows Scheduled Tasks, wp-cron, Github workflows, Kubernetes CronJobs, Heroku Scheduler, data pipelines. A failed cron job often has no immediate visible consequences and can go unnoticed for a long time.

Specific examples:

  • Filesystem backups
  • Database backups
  • Daily, weekly, monthly report emails
  • SSL renewals
  • Business data import and sync jobs
  • Antivirus scans
  • Dynamic DNS updates

Processes, Services, Servers

You can use Healthchecks.io for lightweight server monitoring: ensuring a particular system service or the whole server is alive and healthy. Write a shell script that checks for a specific condition, and pings Healthchecks.io if successful. Run the shell script regularly.

Specific examples:

  • Check a specific docker container is running
  • Check a specific application process is running
  • Check database replication lag
  • Check system resources: free disk, free RAM, ...
  • Send simple, unconditional "I'm alive" messages from your server (or your NAS, router, Raspberry Pi, ...)

Helping Thousands of Developers and Teams Avert Silent Failures

Client logos

“I'm a happy long-time user of Healthchecks.io and keep coming back to it on new projects, because it's really easy to set up and offers reliable monitoring of all our cron jobs.”

“Healthchecks.io has been extremely reliable and useful for the many years we've been using it. The system is very easy to use and well designed - the UI is clear and works the way you'd expect. The API is really handy too.”

“Healthchecks.io is an absolute lifesaver. I'm using it to monitor an IoT gateway, and once, thanks to the quick heads-up from Healthchecks, was able to save the device from being fried after it had been accidentally placed on top of a hot router while cleaning!”

Joona Heikkilä,
maker

“Healthchecks.io is a great service. Simple, effective, highly reliable. It's caught issues on multiple occasions so it makes me look good which is always nice.”