Cron Job & Heartbeat Monitoring
Know when your scheduled jobs stop running.
Cron jobs, backup scripts, data pipelines, and batch processes run silently in the background. When they stop running — due to a cron misconfiguration, a server restart, a permission change, or a code error — there is typically no error, no alert, and no indication that anything has gone wrong. Heartbeat monitoring flips this: your job checks in when it completes, and you're alerted if a check-in is missed.
Silent failures in scheduled jobs
A cron job that stops running produces no output, no error message, and no log entry — it simply doesn't execute. Database backups that haven't run in three weeks. Report generation that failed after a library update. Invoice processing that stopped after a server migration. These are discovered weeks later, often with serious consequences, because there was no system watching for their absence.
Heartbeat monitoring inverts the model. Instead of monitoring for failures, you monitor for the presence of a successful completion signal. When a job finishes, it pings a unique heartbeat URL. If that URL isn't pinged within the expected window, NetTests alerts you. Missing jobs are detected immediately — not weeks later when someone notices the output is missing.
Key features
Heartbeat URLs
Each monitored job gets a unique URL to ping on completion — no agent or client required.
Configurable grace periods
Set how long after a missed check-in to wait before alerting — accommodating variable job runtimes.
Run history
See every heartbeat check-in with timestamp and duration — a complete execution history for every monitored job.
Instant alerting
Receive notifications the moment a job misses its expected check-in window — not hours later.
Start monitoring your cron jobs now
NetTests provides heartbeat URLs for every scheduled job you manage. If a check-in is missed, your team is alerted immediately.
Start monitoring free →