Healthchecks Cron Monitor

Healthchecks is a free and source-available cron job monitoring service that alerts users when scheduled tasks (cron jobs, backups, batch processes) fail to run or complete. Founded in 2015 by Piotr Czekalski in Warsaw, Poland, the service addresses a common operations problem: silently failing cron jobs. Instead of monitoring from outside (like HTTP uptime monitors), this service uses a heartbeat model where the monitored system actively reports in. Key features: heartbeat monitoring: each monitored task gets a unique ping URL. The cron job or scheduled task simply sends an HTTP request (curl or wget) to this URL after completing. If the service doesn't receive a ping within the expected interval, it sends an alert. This catches cases where the job never starts, hangs, or the server crashes. Flexible scheduling: configure grace periods (extra time allowed before alerting), expected check-in frequency (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly), and timezone-aware schedules. Simple ping, signal-failure ping, and start-and-end pings (track job duration). Alert channels: email, SMS (Twilio), Slack, Discord, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty, webhooks, Pushover, and Signal. Multiple channels per check with escalation. Integrations: shell scripts, cron, systemd timers, Kubernetes CronJobs, AWS Lambda, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Ansible, and Docker. The ping URL also accepts email pings (SMTP). Project organization: group checks into projects for team management. Team access with read-only and admin roles. API: RESTful API for check management. Status badges: embeddable SVG badges. Running log: history of received pings with duration tracking. Python. BSD-3-Clause.