Use cases · Monitoring
Monitoring and uptime cron jobs
Health-check work splits two ways: actively pinging services on a clock, and proving that a flow you run elsewhere still runs. The spokes here cover both.
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Monitoring
Monitoring sits in two adjacent boxes. Active monitoring is where Crontap pings your endpoints, records response times and status codes, and alerts when something drifts. The api-health-checks and uptime-monitoring spokes cover that pattern: 1-minute pings, response charts over 90 days, alert routes to email or webhook. Passive monitoring (the dead-man-switch pattern) is where Crontap fires a job on a schedule and a separate watchdog (often Healthchecks.io) confirms the job actually ran. The monitoring-heartbeats spoke covers the pairing.
Both share Crontap's core: per-schedule timezones, retries on 5xx, run-by-run logs with status code and duration, and alert routes that don't depend on whichever stack is having a bad day. The monitoring-heartbeats spoke is the recommended pattern for SLO-grade reliability: Crontap drives the work, Healthchecks.io confirms the work, neither service alone has the full picture but the pair survives either one being down.
Use cases on Monitoring
3 itemsRelated on Crontap
The same Monitoring topic, from other angles.
FAQ
Common questions on Monitoring
- Crontap vs Healthchecks.io: which do I use?
- Both, for different jobs. Crontap is a scheduler with monitoring built in: it fires schedules and tells you when those schedules fail. Healthchecks.io is a monitoring service that watches a job you run elsewhere and pages you when a ping doesn't arrive on time. The dead-man pattern uses both: Crontap fires the work, Healthchecks.io watches that the firing happened.
- Can Crontap replace UptimeRobot?
- For straightforward HTTP up-down checks at minute or 5-minute cadence, the uptime-monitoring spoke covers it. For SMS alerts, third-party page integrations, and 30-second cadence, UptimeRobot has more depth on the monitoring-only feature surface. Often teams use Crontap for scheduled work and Crontap's uptime feature for the basic up-down, and bring a dedicated tool for tier-1 paging.
- How granular is the run log?
- Per-fire: timestamp, response status, duration in milliseconds, response headers, response body (truncated). Useful for spotting 'the cron is firing on time but my endpoint is taking 12 seconds when it used to take 200ms' kind of drift.
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