Your scheduled jobs check in with UptimeRobot when they finish. If a ping shows up late or not at all, you get an alert, so a job that quietly stopped running never slips by.
Get instant alerts when a cron job fails or never starts. The setup will only take you a couple of minutes.
Cron job monitoring is a great choice if you want to know whether your device is connected to the internet all the time.
Use Powershell to send HTTP requests to us and we’ll notify you if they don’t arrive on time.
Get instant alerts via email, SMS, voice call or through one of many integrations (such as Slack, Zapier, Splunk, etc.)
Be the first who knows that your website is down. Reliable monitoring warns you before any significant troubles and saves you money.
Set threshold and recurrence parameters so that you don't miss any serious outage.
Set up maintenance windows to pause the monitoring during the maintenance.
Create monitors with specific monitoring regions you can choose and catch issues that only appear in specific locations.
No internet? We can call or text you when something goes wrong.
Multi-location checks, response time tracking, SSL and domain expiry alerts. The details that turn raw uptime data into something you can actually act on.
From Websites and APIs to servers and cron jobs, UptimeRobot watches every layer. Nine monitor types, one dashboard.
Be transparent. Inform customers of planned outages. Show them that you strive to keep your service 100% online.
You can invite all your team members to access your monitors, keep them notified and manage incidents. Choose from three levels of user access: read, write and notify-only.
Get notified the instant something breaks: by email, SMS, Phone call, Slack, or webhook. Watch your whole stack from one place and pick the channels that reach your team fastest, so critical issues never sit unseen.
Monitor the internet connection or power status of critical infrastructure
Ensure the successful execution of scheduled tasks using cron jobs
Track the uptime of devices connected to the internet
I use UptimeRobot to get push notifications whenever my website goes DOWN. It's really easy and quick to set up and requires no extra changes to your website
Cron job monitoring, also called heartbeat monitoring, checks whether scheduled tasks and background jobs are running on time.
Instead of UptimeRobot checking your service directly, your cron job sends requests to a unique monitoring URL. If the request stops arriving within the expected interval, UptimeRobot sends an alert.
It's commonly used to detect silent failures that don't generate visible errors but still stop important jobs from running.
Need help creating a schedule? Try our free cron expression generator.
A cron job is a scheduled task that runs automatically at a specific time or interval on a server. Teams often use cron jobs for database backups, SSL certificate renewals, report generation, log cleanup, and syncing data between systems.
The term comes from the Unix-based cron scheduler, while Windows uses a similar system called Task Scheduler. In both cases, the goal is to automate recurring tasks without manual input.
Monitor any scheduled task your users, application, or infrastructure depends on. That can include database backups, report generation, data syncs, SSL certificate renewals, email sending jobs, cache rebuilds, and cleanup scripts.
If a task failing for a day would create a real problem, it's probably worth monitoring.
Most monitor types work by having UptimeRobot send requests to your service and check the response. Cron job monitoring works in reverse. Your scheduled task sends a request to UptimeRobot, and an alert is triggered if the request stops arriving.
It's useful for monitoring background workers, scheduled scripts, data syncs, and other processes that don't have a public page or endpoint to check.
Website, ping, port, and keyword monitoring can confirm whether a service is reachable. Cron job monitoring confirms whether a task actually ran.
Yes, cron job monitoring works well for intranet devices and private network systems because the device sends requests outward to UptimeRobot instead of receiving incoming checks.
As long as the device can make outbound HTTP requests, it can send heartbeats to UptimeRobot even if it's behind a firewall or doesn't have a public IP address.
Teams often use this setup for office servers, internal tools, Raspberry Pi projects, and other private infrastructure. You can see a real-world example in our Stratosphere Laboratory case study.
UptimeRobot accepts both GET and POST requests to the heartbeat URL. Most teams send the request at the end of a cron job using tools like curl, wget, PowerShell, or an HTTP request from their application code.
Heartbeats can also be sent from CI/CD pipelines, serverless functions, and scheduled jobs running in languages like Node.js, Python, PHP, or Ruby.
You can find setup examples for crontab and Windows Task Scheduler in the heartbeat monitoring help guide.
UptimeRobot supports heartbeat intervals from 1 minute up to 31 days. That makes it suitable for everything from frequent background jobs to monthly tasks like billing exports, backups, or scheduled reports.
If the expected heartbeat doesn't arrive within the interval and grace period you configured, UptimeRobot sends an alert.
Create a cron job monitor in UptimeRobot, set how often the heartbeat should arrive, and copy the unique monitoring URL generated for the monitor.
Then add a GET or POST request to that URL at the end of your cron job or scheduled task. If the heartbeat stops arriving on time, UptimeRobot sends an alert.
Cron monitoring works in reverse. Instead of UptimeRobot checking your service, your scheduled task checks in with UptimeRobot. Each heartbeat monitor gets a unique URL. You add a request to that URL at the end of your cron job, backup script, or scheduled task, using curl, PowerShell, or a line in your application code. As long as the ping arrives on schedule, the monitor stays up. If it doesn't arrive within your interval plus a grace period, the monitor goes down and you get alerted. This catches the job that silently stopped running, and it works for servers and devices behind a firewall, since they reach out to UptimeRobot rather than the other way around.
What metrics does the cron job (heartbeat) monitor?
A cron job (heartbeat) monitor tracks whether each expected ping arrives on time. From that it records:
You set the interval to match your schedule, from one minute up to 31 days, plus a grace period to absorb normal variation in run time.
What is the best cron job monitoring? Save time and resources and get real-time alerts for seamless operations with cron job monitoring.
Read moreWhat are cron jobs and how do they work? Learn everything you need in our detailed guide and set up your first cron job or monitoring.
Read moreDiscover the importance of incident management and how it can help your business respond to unexpected disruptions and minimize their impact.
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