Blog · Monitoring
Cron monitoring, heartbeats and uptime checks
An uptime monitor catches the 500. A heartbeat catches the silence. These posts cover both halves of the failure space and how to monitor scheduled work without a second bill.
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Monitoring
An uptime monitor watches whether a URL responds correctly. A heartbeat watches whether a URL got pinged at all. The first catches loud failures (your app returns a 500). The second catches the silent ones (the cron didn't fire, the worker is dead, the deploy turned the schedule off). For anything serious you usually want both, but on different things: uptime on customer-facing URLs, heartbeats on periodic backend work.
Crontap covers both in one dashboard. Uptime monitoring runs from 1 minute to 24 hours, with 90 days of green and red bars and alerts on the up-to-down transition. Native Heartbeats use period plus grace, accept /fail, keep 90 days of event history, and route to connected notification channels plus optional generic webhook Integrations. The posts below cover the heartbeat-vs-uptime decision, the independent Healthchecks.io pattern, the UptimeRobot alternative, and the Cronhub shutdown migration.
Blog on Monitoring
11 items- Product
Slack, Discord and Telegram alerts are here
Connect chat channels once, then route formatted schedule, uptime and heartbeat alerts with defaults, per-entity overrides and delivery tests.
- Product
Introducing Crontap Heartbeats: alerts for jobs that go silent
Give a recurring job a secret ping URL. Crontap alerts connected email and chat channels on missed deadlines or /fail signals and records 90 days of history.
- Product Updates
Automatic retries with exponential backoff ✨ Crontap product updates.
Failed scheduled calls now retry automatically with exponential backoff. See every attempt in history, tune the policy on Pro, or configure it through the API.
- Reference
Dead man's switch, explained for developers
Most monitoring watches for errors. A dead man's switch watches for silence. Learn the pattern and wire up a native Crontap heartbeat.
- Guides
Auto-triage a failing endpoint into a Slack incident summary
You already schedule a check against an endpoint, and when it fails you get a raw 500 body or a stack trace. Turn on Also run on failure and the AI reads that error, scores severity, and posts an incident summary to Slack.
- Alternatives
Cronhub shut down: how to migrate (and what to pick next)
Cronhub stopped billing on May 31, 2026 and closed on June 30, 2026. Migration paths for both halves of the former product (Scheduler and Monitoring), an honest comparison of Crontap, Healthchecks.io, Cronitor, and UptimeRobot, plus a click-by-click walkthrough.
- Alternatives
UptimeRobot alternative for developers who already cron
Crontap monitors uptime right next to the cron jobs you already run: one dashboard, one bill, one alert pipeline. Side-by-side with UptimeRobot, Better Stack, and Pingdom on intervals, history, and alert channels.
- Product
Introducing Crontap built-in uptime monitoring
Uptime monitoring lives next to your scheduled jobs: 1-minute checks on Pro, a 90-day bar chart, and connected Notifications.
- Monitoring
Cron heartbeats vs uptime monitors: which do you actually need?
Heartbeats catch silent failures. Uptime monitors catch loud ones. They look similar and aren't. A four-criteria framework for picking one, both, or neither.
- Listicle
Synthetic monitoring tools (12 picks)
The four flavors of synthetic monitoring (browser, API, uptime, cron-scheduled), 3 picks per category, and an honest take on which one fits which job.
- Guides
Healthchecks.io and Crontap: pair them or replace one?
Crontap now covers native heartbeat monitoring. See when one tool is enough, when Healthchecks.io goes deeper, and when two independent systems are worth it.
Related on Crontap
The same Monitoring topic, from other angles.
FAQ
Common questions on Monitoring
- Heartbeat or uptime monitor for my nightly cron?
- Both, on different things. Put an uptime monitor on the customer-facing endpoint that the cron might cause to misbehave. Put a heartbeat on the cron itself so you find out the moment it stops firing, not the morning after the digest didn't land.
- Cronhub shut down. What's the migration path?
- Cronhub closed June 30, 2026. The dedicated migration post walks both halves: schedules move to Crontap Schedules and heartbeat monitors move to native Crontap Heartbeats.
- How is Crontap's built-in uptime different from UptimeRobot?
- Crontap runs uptime on the same dashboard as the schedules that hit those URLs. UptimeRobot is uptime-only, which is fine if that's the only thing you need. If you also run scheduled HTTP work, the wedge is one tab, one bill, one alert routing.
- What cadence makes sense for an uptime check?
- One minute for anything customer-facing. Five minutes is fine for internal services. Slower than that and you risk missing short outages entirely.
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