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Self-Hosting Healthchecks.io: Cron Job Monitoring

Healthchecks.io monitors your cron jobs and scheduled tasks. If a job doesn't check in on time, you get an alert.

healthcheckscronmonitoringdevops

The Problem


Cron jobs fail silently. Your nightly backup stopped running three weeks ago? You won't know until you need a restore.


How Healthchecks Works


It's a dead man's switch:

1. Create a check with an expected interval (e.g., every 24 hours)

2. Your cron job pings the check URL when it completes

3. If the ping doesn't arrive on time, you get an alert


Example

Backup cron job:

0 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -m 10 https://hc.example.com/ping/uuid-here


If backup.sh fails, the curl never runs. Healthchecks notices the missing ping and alerts you.


Features


Checks

  • Expected intervals (every hour, daily, weekly)
  • Grace periods (allow late pings before alerting)
  • Per-check notification settings

    • Alerting

  • Email
  • Slack, Discord, Telegram
  • PagerDuty, Opsgenie
  • Webhooks
  • SMS

    • Dashboard

  • Visual overview of all checks
  • Last ping time and status
  • Ping history and execution times

    • Badges

    Embed status badges in dashboards or documentation.


    What to Monitor


  • Database backups (most critical)
  • File backups
  • Log rotation
  • Certificate renewal
  • Data sync jobs
  • Report generation
  • Cleanup scripts

    • Deployment


    1. Deploy Healthchecks on TinyPod

    2. Create checks for each cron job

    3. Add ping URLs to your scripts

    4. Configure notifications


    Resources: 1 CPU, 512 MB RAM.


    Best Practice


    Ping on success AND failure:

    curl -m 10 https://hc.example.com/ping/uuid/start

    /usr/local/bin/backup.sh

    curl -m 10 https://hc.example.com/ping/uuid/$?


    This tracks execution time and failure status.