Product

Cron monitoring

Track heartbeats from scheduled jobs and background tasks. Know when a job missed its run, started late, or never finished — without checking logs.

Hosted in the EU

GDPR-friendly by design

Core monitoring data stays in the EU

Each job sends a heartbeat when it starts or finishes

WatchCat expects the heartbeat within a defined interval

Missing or delayed signals trigger alerts

Start/end tracking catches jobs that never finished, ran too long, or overlapped

Technical flow

How it works in detail

Each scheduled job must send a signal within its expected interval.
WatchCat checks whether the latest heartbeat arrived when it should have.
If no heartbeat arrives, the job is treated as missing and an alert can be triggered.

A grace period gives the job extra time before it is marked as failed.
This avoids alerts for small scheduling delays or short queue backlogs.
A heartbeat that arrives after the expected time is recorded as late, and any open incident resolves.

Jobs can send a start signal, a finish signal, or both.
Start and finish tracking helps identify jobs that began but never completed.
If a job starts before the previous run finishes, WatchCat can detect an overlap.
Set a maximum runtime and WatchCat opens an incident when a run passes it, even if the end ping eventually arrives.

Every ping is recorded as an execution — success, late, missed, or failed — with timestamps and duration.
Each execution has a detail page with a timeline of what happened during that run.
Monitors can optionally store the ping request body (up to 16 KB) to keep lightweight run metadata such as records processed or backup size.

An incident is created when a job is considered failed, missing, late, or overlapping.
The incident stays open while WatchCat continues to see invalid or missing runs.
The incident is resolved when the next valid run occurs.

Setup

One HTTP request from your job is all it takes. Use curl, wget, or any HTTP client.

Works with system cron, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Make.com, n8n, and any script or scheduler that can make an HTTP request.

Basic — ping when the job finishes

curl https://watchcat.io/p/cron/YOUR_TOKEN

Start / end tracking — detect jobs that began but never finished

curl https://watchcat.io/p/cron/YOUR_TOKEN/start
# ... run your job ...
curl https://watchcat.io/p/cron/YOUR_TOKEN/end

Explicit failure — signal an error without relying on a missing heartbeat

curl https://watchcat.io/p/cron/YOUR_TOKEN/fail

Why it matters

Cron jobs have no built-in alert when they miss a run or finish late
Grace periods absorb small scheduling delays without triggering false alerts
Overlap detection catches runaway jobs that start before the previous run finishes
Every run lands in an execution log — see what happened without digging through server logs

Use cases

A nightly database backup that must finish before the business day starts
A background worker processing invoices — stuck jobs cost money, not just time
A Make.com scenario syncing leads at 03:00 — if it stops, nobody notices until noon

5 monitors free · no credit card required