Cron & Heartbeat Monitoring

Know the moment a cron job fails - not three weeks later

Your nightly backup, your ETL pipeline, your cleanup script - when a scheduled job dies, it dies silently. No error page, no 500, nothing to monitor with a normal uptime check. PingGuard gives every job a heartbeat URL. Each run checks in. The moment a job misses its window, you get an alert - before the missing backup becomes the reason you can't restore.

Monitor Your Crons - Free See pricing

How cron monitoring works

PingGuard gives each scheduled job a unique heartbeat URL. At the end of every successful run, your job sends a quick ping - one line of curl at the end of your script or crontab entry.

You tell PingGuard how often the job should check in. If the next ping doesn't arrive on time - the job crashed, the server rebooted, the cron silently stopped firing - we mark it down and alert you immediately. This is the classic dead man's switch: silence is the signal.

When the job checks in again, you get a recovery notification. No more discovering a dead backup the day you actually need it.

What you can monitor

  • Database & file backups

    The #1 silent failure. Know your nightly dump actually ran - every night.

  • ETL & data pipelines

    Scheduled imports, syncs, and transforms - catch a stalled pipeline before stale data ships.

  • Cron jobs & systemd timers

    Any crontab entry or scheduled task on any server - add one curl line and you're covered.

  • Background workers & queues

    Celery, Sidekiq, cron-driven queue workers - alert when a worker stops processing.

  • Multi-channel alerts

    Email on the free plan. Add Slack, Discord, Telegram & webhooks on Pro.

  • AI incident analysis Pro+

    When a job recovers, AI analyzes the timing and gap to help explain what likely went wrong.

One line in your crontab

Append a ping to the end of your job. If it succeeds, PingGuard hears from it. If it doesn't, you hear from PingGuard.

# Nightly backup - pings PingGuard only if the backup succeeds
0 3 * * *  /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://pingguard.org/heartbeat/your-monitor-token

Works with any language or scheduler - anything that can make an HTTP request.

Switching from Cronitor or Healthchecks?

PingGuard does cron heartbeat monitoring and full website, API, and SSL monitoring in one tool - so you're not paying for two services. The free plan covers 10 monitors of any type.

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No credit card required. Free plan includes 10 monitors.

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