Heartbeat monitoring
for cron jobs and backups.
The nightly backup, the hourly import, the job that sends invoices: each calls a secret ping address when it finishes. When a ping does not arrive in time, or reports a failure, you get an alert.
- From Solo
- Start, finish and fail pings
- A grace time you choose
How it works
Three steps, then it watches the job for you.
Name the job and its schedule
Say how often it runs and set a grace time: how long after the expected time to wait before the ping counts as missed.
Call the ping address
Copy the ping address when it is shown and call it at the end of the job, for example with
curl -fsS --retry 3.A missed ping alerts
An incident opens when a call is missed or reports a failure, and closes when the job reports in again.
What you get
Run time, measured
Call the address with /start when the job begins and the run time is measured; set a longest allowed run if you like.
Failures the job reports
Call it with /fail when the job fails, and the failure opens an incident.
A secret address
The ping address is shown once and only a hash of it is kept. Lost it? Make a new one on the check.
It reports the miss
It tells you the job did not report in. Why is in the job’s own logs.
Which plans include it
Heartbeats come with Solo and up; the plan sets how many you can have.
- FreeNot included
- SoloIncluded5 heartbeat monitors
- TeamIncluded25 heartbeat monitors
- AgencyIncluded100 heartbeat monitors
- Agency PlusIncluded200 heartbeat monitors
Questions about heartbeat monitoring
How does my job send the ping?
It calls the ping address over HTTPS when it finishes, for example by adding curl -fsS --retry 3 <your ping URL> to the end of the cron line. Any HTTP client works.
What if I lose the ping address?
Only a hash of it is kept, so it cannot be shown again. Make a new ping address on the check and use that one.
Are heartbeats confirmed by two regions?
No. Its incident opens when your job’s ping is late or reports a failure. A status page shows such an incident as a task that did not report in on time.
Does it tell me why a job failed?
No. It tells you that the job did not report or reported a failure; the reason is in the job’s own logs.
Hear about the backup that did not run.
Add your sites: checking starts as soon as you do.
No card for the Free plan.