Missed-run detection
The dead-man’s-switch: if a job doesn’t check in within its schedule and grace period, we alert you — catching silent failures active monitoring can’t.
PingWise cron job monitoring watches your backups, billing runs and scheduled tasks with a simple heartbeat. Your job pings a unique URL when it runs — if it doesn’t check in on time, or reports a failure, we alert you instantly. No agent to install.
0 2 * * *) and a grace period. You get a unique ping URL.0 2 * * * /home/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://pingwise.co/ping/your-unique-token
The && means the ping is sent only when the job exits successfully — so a crash, a server that never woke up, or a failed backup is caught by the missed-ping deadline. Optionally ping https://pingwise.co/ping/your-unique-token/start when it begins (measures duration) and https://pingwise.co/ping/your-unique-token/fail to report an error immediately.
The dead-man’s-switch: if a job doesn’t check in within its schedule and grace period, we alert you — catching silent failures active monitoring can’t.
Ping the /fail URL (or send a non-zero exit code) and PingWise flags the run as failed immediately, with the cause on record.
Ping /start when the job begins and PingWise measures duration — and alerts if a job starts but never finishes within its maximum run time.
Schedule with the same 5-field cron syntax as your crontab (with a timezone), or a simple “every N minutes/hours/days”.
Email, SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, webhook and ClickUp — the same channels as the rest of your monitoring.
Just add a URL to your crontab. Works on any server, container or CI runner that has curl — nothing to install and nothing to change in your code.
Cron job monitoring (also called heartbeat or dead-man’s-switch monitoring) tells you when a scheduled job — a cron job, backup, or recurring task — fails to run. Instead of checking a job from the outside, the job reports in: it pings a unique URL each time it runs. If an expected ping doesn’t arrive on schedule, PingWise alerts you.
Create a cron check to get a unique ping URL, then add it to your job — for example append “&& curl -fsS https://pingwise.co/ping/<token>” to the crontab line. The job pings PingWise when it finishes successfully. If the ping is missing (schedule plus grace) or the job reports a failure, we alert you.
No. The simplest setup is a single line added to your crontab — no agent, no library, no changes inside your program. Any server with curl works. Optional /start and /fail pings give you run-time duration and explicit failure detection if you want them.
A job that never ran (missed ping), a job that reported a failure (/fail or a non-zero exit code), and a job that started but ran too long (via /start plus a max run time). You schedule with a simple interval or a full cron expression with a timezone.