How to monitor cron jobs and backups with heartbeats

Silent failures

Cron jobs, backups and queue workers don't have a URL you can check. When they stop, nothing happens — until you discover a week of missing backups.

The heartbeat pattern

Give each job a unique ping URL. At the end of every successful run, the job calls that URL:

0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://status.example.com/api/ping/YOUR_TOKEN

If the ping doesn't arrive within the expected interval plus a grace period, you get an alert.

Report failures and duration

• Call /start when the job begins and the normal URL when it ends to measure how long it takes.
• Call /fail from your error handler to be alerted immediately.

Good practices

• Set the grace period a little longer than the job's normal run time.
• Use one heartbeat per job, so the alert tells you exactly what broke.
• Add heartbeats to your status page only for jobs customers care about.