Know the instant a cron job stops running
A failed cron job is invisible until something downstream breaks. PingInsight's inbound heartbeat monitoring expects a ping from your job on schedule and alerts you the moment it misses — a dead man's switch for backups, ETL, billing runs, and any scheduled work.
Silent failures
Jobs fail quietly — a crashed worker, a missed schedule, a hung process, an early exit before the step that matters. Heartbeat checks turn “no news” into an actual alert: if the expected ping doesn't arrive on time, you hear about it instead of discovering it weeks later.
One place for jobs and services
Background work shouldn't live in a separate tool from the rest of your stack. Monitor heartbeats alongside your HTTP/API, TCP, UDP, DNS, SSL, mail, SSH, and NTP checks, so backups, ETL, and billing runs sit in the same dashboard — and the same alert channels — as everything else you watch.
Proof of when it stopped
“When did the backups last succeed?” shouldn't be a guess. Exact-second records show precisely when a job last checked in and when it recovered — invaluable for backups, billing reconciliation, and compliance evidence, with roll-up retention keeping the history for up to 730 days on Business.
A day in the life
Your nightly database backup runs at 03:00. For months it just works — until a disk fills up and the job exits early, before the upload step. Nothing errors loudly; the cron line simply produces no backup. With PingInsight, the backup script curls a heartbeat URL only on success, so when 03:00 passes with no check-in, the heartbeat is marked missed and you're alerted in Slack and email that morning — not three weeks later when you need to restore. The timeline shows the exact second the last successful run checked in, so you know precisely which backups exist and which don't.
- ✓Inbound heartbeat endpoints your job pings on schedule
- ✓Alerts on a missed check-in, with automatic recovery notices
- ✓Exact-second timelines showing the last successful check-in
- ✓Heartbeats live alongside HTTP/API, TCP, DNS, SSL, mail, SSH, and NTP checks
- ✓Alerts to email, Slack, Teams, Discord, PagerDuty, and signed webhooks
- ✓Roll-up retention up to 730 days (Business) for backup and compliance records
# /etc/cron.d/nightly-backup
0 3 * * * backup-user /opt/scripts/backup.sh && \
curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 \
https://hb.pinginsight.com/h/your-heartbeat-id > /dev/null
# If backup.sh fails (or the host is down), the heartbeat
# is never pinged — PingInsight alerts you on the missed check-in.Dig into Uptime monitoring and Incident management, review pricing, or see how PingInsight compares to UptimeRobot.
Frequently asked questions
- How does heartbeat (dead man's switch) monitoring work?
- You add a heartbeat check and PingInsight gives you a unique URL. Your cron job or worker requests that URL each time it runs successfully. If the expected ping doesn't arrive within the schedule you set, the check-in is marked missed and you're alerted — so you find out the moment a job stops running.
- What happens when a job misses its check-in?
- PingInsight marks the heartbeat as missed and notifies you on your configured channels — email, Slack, Teams, Discord, PagerDuty, signed webhooks, and more. When the job next checks in, a recovery notice is sent and the exact-second timeline records when it resumed.
- Can I monitor jobs and HTTP services in the same place?
- Yes. Heartbeat is one of the 14 check types, so scheduled jobs sit in the same dashboard as your HTTP/API, TCP, UDP, DNS, SSL, domain, mail, SSH, and NTP checks — sharing the same alert channels and incident workflow.
- Do you keep a record of when a job last succeeded?
- Yes. The timeline records the exact second of each check-in and miss, and roll-up retention keeps that history (365 days on Pro, 730 on Business, 1,095 on Enterprise) — useful for backup verification, billing reconciliation, and compliance.
PingInsight for cron & scheduled jobs
Free forever. Add a heartbeat to your next cron job.