Monitoring Cron Jobs the Right Way

Cron jobs are the silent workhorses of your infrastructure. When they fail silently, you might not know until it's too late.

The Silent Failure Problem

Unlike web services that immediately show errors, cron jobs can fail without anyone noticing. Your daily backup might have stopped working weeks ago.

Heartbeat Monitoring

The solution is heartbeat monitoring. Your cron job pings a unique URL when it completes successfully. If we don't receive a ping within the expected window, we alert you.

Implementation

curl -fsS --retry 3 https://hc.pulsekeep.io/your-unique-id

Add this to the end of your cron script, and you're protected.