Cron job monitoring FAQ

Cronomonitor is a heartbeat monitoring service for cron jobs and scheduled tasks: each job pings a unique URL when it runs, and Cronomonitor alerts you by email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams or webhook when a job doesn't run, fails, runs too long or slows down.

Every plan includes unlimited checks, and there's a 14-day free trial with no card required.

Create a check, then add a ping to the end of the job's line in your crontab. Cronomonitor expects that ping on the job's schedule and alerts you if it doesn't arrive.

Adding the job's exit code to the URL, as below, also reports failures straight away.

Yes. Paste the output of crontab -l into a project and Cronomonitor creates a check for each job, with the same schedule, then gives you the same crontab back with a ping added to each line.

Comments and settings are kept as they were. Lines that don't run on a schedule, such as @reboot, are listed and skipped.

No. A job only needs to make an HTTP request to its check's URL when it finishes, usually with curl, so it works anywhere that can reach the internet: servers, containers, CI pipelines and serverless functions.

Yes. Each check comes with ready-to-paste setup for crontab, a shell wrapper script, systemd timers, GitHub Actions, Kubernetes CronJobs, Laravel's scheduler, Python, Node.js and Ruby, filled in with that check's URL and schedule.

Each check knows when its job should run and allows a grace period on top. If no ping has arrived by then, the check goes down and you're alerted, usually within a minute.

When the job pings again, the check recovers and you get a recovery alert.

Report the job's exit code by ending the ping URL with $? in your crontab: 0 counts as a success and anything else as a failure, which alerts you straight away. You can also call the URL with /fail on the end.

Yes. Give a check keywords such as ERROR or Traceback, and send the job's output with its ping. A run whose output contains one of them counts as a failure, even if the job exited 0.

Yes. Call the check's URL with /start when the job begins and Cronomonitor times every run. You can set a maximum run time, and turn on an alert for runs that take more than twice as long as usual.

Each check also charts its recent run times, so slowdowns are easy to spot.

By email, and to Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams or any webhook. Set destinations once per project and every check uses them, or give a check its own. Failed deliveries are retried automatically.

Set a check to alert only after several failures in a row. You can also choose reminders while a job stays down, and each person can pick whether they get every alert email, only down alerts, or none.

Yes. Pause a check to stop all alerts for it, or schedule a maintenance window in advance. Time inside a maintenance window doesn't count against uptime.

Yes. Choose the days, a start and end time, and Cronomonitor applies the window every week in your time zone, through daylight-saving changes. Nothing alerts during it, and it doesn't count against uptime.

Yes. A check can follow a standard 5-field cron expression in any time zone, including daylight-saving changes, or a simple interval such as every hour. Cronomonitor can also suggest a cron schedule from a job's recent runs.

As often as every minute with a cron schedule. Interval checks can run anywhere from every minute to once a week, and cron schedules have no upper limit, so monthly jobs work too.

The extra time Cronomonitor waits after a job was due before alerting, from a minute up to an hour. It covers normal variation, such as a job that takes a few minutes to finish before it pings.

Yes. Invite teammates to your account. Owners see every project, and members see the projects shared with them. Starter includes up to 5 people and Team up to 15.

Every project has a status page showing each check's current state, its uptime over the last 30 days and recent incidents, for your team to check at a glance.

Starter keeps the last 100 pings per check for 30 days, and Team keeps up to 1,000 for a year. Each ping records when it arrived, its result and run time, and up to 10 KB of any output the job sends.

Yes. The Team plan includes a REST API for creating and managing checks from scripts and deploy pipelines, using API keys that account owners create.

Yes. Every check has a status badge image you can embed in a README or wiki with a line of Markdown. It shows whether the job is up, without revealing its ping URL.

Yes. Every project has a monthly uptime report with each check's uptime, downtime and incidents, and any notes on them. Print it or save it as a PDF to share with clients or your manager.

Yes. Download a project's incidents as a CSV file, for one month or the last year, with start and end times, durations, downtime outside maintenance, and notes. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers.

Yes. Every Monday morning you can get an email with each project's uptime, incidents, failed runs and any jobs getting slower. You can turn it off on your Account page.

Yes. Turn it on from your Account page with any authenticator app, such as 1Password or Google Authenticator. You also get one-time recovery codes in case you lose your phone.

Yes. The Team plan includes an audit log of every change in your account, such as checks created or deleted, plan changes and new API keys, kept for a year.

Yes. Download a JSON copy of your projects, checks and incident history from your Account page at any time. Deleting your account removes all of its data.

Starter costs £9 a month or £90 a year, and Team costs £29 a month or £290 a year. Both include unlimited checks; Team adds more people and longer history.

Yes. Every account starts with a 14-day free trial with every Team feature, and no card is needed to sign up.

Choose a plan to keep adding checks and projects. Everything you set up during the trial, including your checks and their history, stays in your account.

Yes. Cancel from the billing page whenever you like, and you keep access until the end of the period you've paid for.

Yes. Ask within 14 days of any payment, first or renewal, and you'll get all of it back, no questions asked. After that you can still cancel at any time and keep access until the end of the period you've paid for.

Paddle, our merchant of record. They process payments, handle VAT and sales tax and send invoices; Cronomonitor never sees your card details.

Cronomonitor charges a flat price with unlimited checks, instead of pricing by the number of checks or monitors. For 100 checks and one user, Cronomonitor costs £9 a month, compared with $20 on Healthchecks.io and $205 on Cronitor, based on their public pricing pages in October 2026.

Plans change, so check their sites for current details.