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:

On Healthchecks.io, generate a unique ping URL for your background job.
Update your job to send an HTTP request to the ping URL every time the job runs.
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:

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.

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 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 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.

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:

Webhooks

Slack
Chat

Discord
Chat

Gotify
Push Notifications

Matrix
Chat

Mattermost
Chat

Microsoft Teams
Chat

ntfy
Push Notifications

Opsgenie
Incident Management

PagerDuty
Incident Management

PagerTree
Incident Management

Phone Call

Prometheus
Event Monitoring

Pushbullet
Push Notifications

Pushover
Push Notifications

Rocket.Chat
Chat

Signal
Chat

SMS

Spike.sh
Incident Management

Telegram
Chat

Trello
Project Management

Splunk On-Call
Incident Management

WhatsApp
Chat

Zulip
Chat

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.