UptimeGuard

Cron / Heartbeat Monitor

Ensure your cron jobs, scheduled tasks, and background workers run on time.

How it works

Unlike other monitors where UptimeGuard checks your service, a heartbeat monitor works in reverse — your service pings UptimeGuard. When you create a heartbeat monitor, you get a unique URL. Your cron job or scheduled task should send an HTTP request to this URL after each successful run.

If UptimeGuard doesn't receive a ping within the expected interval (plus a grace period), the monitor goes down and alerts are triggered.

Configuration

SettingDescription
Expected IntervalHow often you expect the heartbeat (e.g. every 5 minutes, hourly, daily).
Grace PeriodExtra time allowed before marking the monitor as down (e.g. 5 minutes). Prevents false positives for jobs that run slightly late.

Integration

After creating the monitor, copy the heartbeat URL and add it to your cron job:

# Add to the end of your cron job
curl -fsS --retry 3 https://app.uptimeguard.com/api/heartbeat/YOUR_ID

# Or in a script
wget -q -O /dev/null https://app.uptimeguard.com/api/heartbeat/YOUR_ID

Use cases

  • Database backups
  • Report generation scripts
  • Data synchronization tasks
  • Queue workers and background processors
  • Cleanup and maintenance scripts
KeywordAPI Endpoint