Cron Job Monitoring

Your cron job ran.
That's not the same as working.

Most tools only check if your job ran. They don't check if it worked. DeadManCheck catches all three failure modes — missing jobs, slow jobs, and jobs that run but produce nothing.

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The three failure modes

⏰

Job stops running

The classic dead man's switch. Your nightly backup didn't ping. Your ETL didn't run. DeadManCheck alerts when expected pings go missing.

⌛

Job runs too long

Your 2-minute backup job is now taking 45 minutes. It will technically "succeed" — but something is wrong. DeadManCheck tracks duration and alerts on anomalies automatically.

Unique to DeadManCheck

📭

Job runs but does nothing

Exit code 0. On time. But it exported 0 rows, synced 0 records, or returned nothing. DeadManCheck checks whether your job actually produced real results — not just that it ran.

Unique to DeadManCheck

Two lines to set up

Add a ping to the end of your job. DeadManCheck handles the rest — no agents, no SDKs, no config files.

# Bash — missing ping alert

your-job.sh && curl -s https://deadmancheck.io/ping/your-token

# Duration monitoring — wrap with /start and /end

curl -s https://deadmancheck.io/ping/your-token/start

your-job.sh

curl -s https://deadmancheck.io/ping/your-token/end

# Output assertions — send job result as JSON (Developer+ plan)

curl -s -X POST https://deadmancheck.io/ping/your-token/end \

-H "Content-Type: application/json" \

-d '{"rows_exported": 1452, "status": "ok"}'

Everything included

✓

Missing ping alerts

Alert via email, Slack, webhook, PagerDuty, or SMS when your job doesn't check in.

✓

Duration monitoring

Learns your job's normal runtime. Alerts when it drifts — no manual thresholds needed.

✓

Did it actually work?

Validate what your job produced on every ping. Alert when rows drop to zero, output is empty, or results don't match your rules.

✓

Uptime monitoring

HTTP uptime checks included alongside your cron monitors. One dashboard for everything.

✓

Public status pages

Free public status page for your monitors. Share a live status URL with your users or team.

✓

Prometheus metrics

Scrape job health, last ping time, and duration stats directly into your existing metrics stack.

✓

Open source & self-hosted

Run it yourself for free. Full source on GitHub. No vendor lock-in.

✓

Flat monthly pricing

Not per-monitor. Add 200 monitors on the Developer plan — still $12/month.

How it compares

Feature	DeadManCheck	Healthchecks.io	Cronitor
Missing ping detection	✓	✓	✓
Long-running job detection automatic baseline	✓ automatic	Manual grace period	Manual only
Output assertions	✓	✗	✗
Uptime monitoring	✓	✗	✓
Public status pages	✓ free	✗	+$25/mo
Open source / self-hosted	✓	✓	✗
Flat monthly pricing	✓	✓	✗ per-monitor
Prometheus metrics	✓	✓	✗

Cron job not running? Job succeeded but did nothing? Duration spiking?

Whether you're dealing with a scheduled task that stopped running, a cron job that's taking too long, or a job that ran but returned no data — DeadManCheck covers all three.

Most cron monitoring tools were built to solve one problem: the missing ping. DeadManCheck was built to solve all three ways scheduled jobs fail — including the two that look like success.