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Cron job monitoring
Stop finding out about failed jobs days later.
Monitor scheduled jobs, backups, scripts, queues, and recurring tasks with simple check-ins. If a job misses its expected window, OnlineOrNot alerts you before stale work becomes a customer problem.
- Feature
- Monitor jobs that should check in on a schedule
- Feature
- Catch missed backups and stale queues
- Feature
- Alert when scripts stop running
- Feature
- Use cron expression helpers when setting schedules
Example
0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && \
curl https://onlineornot.com/api/heartbeat/YOUR_CHECK_ID- Silent failures become visible.
- Cron jobs often fail quietly. OnlineOrNot expects a check-in and alerts when that check-in does not arrive.
- Backups
- Billing jobs
- Queue workers
- Simple to add anywhere.
- A job only needs to call its OnlineOrNot URL when it succeeds. No agent, sidecar, or SDK is required.
- curl
- fetch
- Any language that can make HTTP requests
- Works where your jobs already run.
- Use check-ins from cron, GitHub Actions, scheduled workers, containers, servers, or scripts running on infrastructure you already operate.
- Cron
- CI jobs
- Serverless workers
- Separate missed runs from failed services.
- A website check tells you whether something can be reached. Cron monitoring tells you whether the background work that keeps the business current actually happened.
- Fresh backups
- Completed invoices
- Processed queues
Frequently asked questions
The short version. The docs have the details when you need them.
- Do I need to install an agent?
- No. Your job sends a check-in request when it runs successfully.
- Can I monitor jobs that run rarely?
- Yes. Configure the expected interval for the job and OnlineOrNot will alert when it misses that schedule.
- Should the check-in happen at the start or end of a job?
- Send the check-in after the job succeeds. That way a failed script, partial backup, or crashed queue worker does not look healthy.
- Can cron job alerts go to the same places as uptime alerts?
- Yes. Missed cron jobs can alert Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, email, SMS, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, incident.io, Grafana OnCall, or webhooks.
Start with cron job monitoring.
Start with the background job you would least want to discover broken next week.