Cron job and background task monitoring

Heartbeat URLs that alert when a scheduled job stops running. Catch the backup that has silently failed for three weeks before you need to restore from it.

Nothing pages you when a cron job stops running. That is the whole problem: the failure mode is silence.

How it works

Give the job a heartbeat URL and have it call that URL on success:

0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://pulzone.com/h/YOUR-KEY

If the ping does not arrive inside the window you set, you get alerted.

What it catches

The nightly backup that has been failing since a disk filled up. The invoice run that stopped after a deploy. The queue worker that died and was never restarted.

Related: API monitoring.