Uptime monitoring
Heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs and backups
The worst failures are silent: the nightly backup that stopped running three weeks ago. A heartbeat monitor gives each job a unique URL. Ping it when the job succeeds; if the ping doesn’t arrive within the interval plus grace period, Statance alerts you.
What to monitor on Cron job heartbeats
- 01Last ping timeShows exactly when the job last succeeded.
- 02Explicit failuresPing /fail to report a failure immediately instead of waiting for the timeout.
Set it up
Create a heartbeat monitor
Set the interval to how often the job runs and a grace period for slow runs.
Ping it from your job
Only ping on success by chaining with &&.
0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS -m 10 https://api.statance.com/hb/YOUR_TOKENReport failures explicitly
/usr/local/bin/backup.sh || curl -fsS -m 10 https://api.statance.com/hb/YOUR_TOKEN/fail
Recommended alerts for Cron job heartbeats
- Job did not check in within interval + grace
- Job reported failure
- Job recovered
Send alerts to
Cron job heartbeats monitoring FAQ
Does it work with systemd timers, Kubernetes CronJobs or GitHub Actions?
Yes — anything that can make an HTTP request. Add a curl or wget call at the end of the job.
GET or POST?
Both work, as does HEAD.
Know before your users do.
Free forever for 3 servers and 10 monitors. No credit card. Install the agent in under a minute.