Heartbeat Monitoring for Batch and Cron Workloads
A heartbeat (or “success ping”) tells an external service: “this run completed.” If the heartbeat stops arriving, the service assumes failure — the classic dead man's switch pattern.
CronCraft is built around HTTPS heartbeats. Compare with log scraping or email-only approaches in how to monitor cron jobs.
Why heartbeats win for cron
- Works from any host that has outbound HTTPS.
- Success is explicit — no guessing from exit codes trapped in mail spool.
- One line to add at the end of a script.
Example
./run_report.sh && curl -fsS https://croncraft.app/ping/YOUR_TOKEN > /dev/null
Related: Dead man's switch monitoring and background job monitoring.
Free tier includes email alerts on missed heartbeats.
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