Cron job monitoring

Free cron job, backup and CI monitoring with heartbeats

A backup that silently stops running looks exactly like a backup that works, until the day you need it. A heartbeat flips that around: the job reports in when it's done, and FlareWatch tells you when it doesn't.

Nightly backuplast 26 runs

on time
on time
on time
on time
on time
on time
on time
on time
on time
late
on time
on time
on time
on time
on time
on time
missed
on time
on time
on time
on time
on time
failed
on time
on time
running

on timelatefailedmissedrunning

How it works

You say how often the job runs and how late it may be. FlareWatch expects a ping inside that window.
The monitor goes down when the ping doesn't arrive in time, or when the job reports a failure. You get the same alerts as for any other monitor.
Heartbeats show on the status page next to your websites and APIs, and they can depend on another monitor, like the server the job runs on.

{
  id: 'nightly-backup',
  name: 'Nightly backup',
  method: 'HEARTBEAT',
  periodSeconds: 86400, // how often the job runs
  graceSeconds: 3600, // how late it may be
}

In packages/config/src/worker.ts of your fork.

Ping URLs

Each heartbeat has its own URL with a secret token, so nobody else can report for your job.

Method	Route	Means
GET, POST, HEAD	/ping/<id>/<token>	The job finished.
GET, POST	/ping/<id>/<token>/start	The job started.
POST	/ping/<id>/<token>/fail	The job failed. The body is the message.
GET, POST	/ping/<id>/<token>/<0-255>	The job exited with this code. 0 is fine.

Pings are limited to 30 a minute per monitor, which stops a looping script. Jobs that run every minute are fine.

Examples

Ping on success

./backup.sh && curl -fsS "https://status.example.com/ping/nightly-backup/<token>"

Send the exit code, so a failure shows at the next check

./backup.sh; curl -fsS "https://status.example.com/ping/nightly-backup/<token>/$?"

In a crontab

0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh; curl -fsS "https://status.example.com/ping/nightly-backup/<token>/$?"

With systemd

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/curl -fsS https://status.example.com/ping/nightly-backup/<token>/start
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/backup.sh
ExecStopPost=/usr/bin/curl -fsS "https://status.example.com/ping/nightly-backup/<token>/${EXIT_STATUS}"