Monitor Your Database Backup Cron Job
Backups are the canonical silent-failure job: cron still runs, disk fills, credentials rotate, and nobody notices until restore time. A success ping after a real backup proves the pipeline completed.
General cron context: cron job monitoring · silent failures
The problem
pg_dump fails, S3 upload fails, or the job stops being scheduled — email-to-root is easy to ignore. CronCraft alerts when the ping does not arrive.
Copy-paste pattern (PostgreSQL)
#!/bin/bash # backup.sh — nightly set -euo pipefail pg_dump mydb | gzip > /backup/db-$(date +%F).sql.gz aws s3 cp /backup/db-$(date +%F).sql.gz s3://my-bucket/backups/ curl -fsS --retry 3 https://croncraft.app/ping/YOUR_TOKEN > /dev/null
If it fails
Either the script exits non-zero before curl (no ping → late alert) or you call /ping/TOKEN/fail from an error trap. See README for failure endpoint details.
Register a job whose schedule matches crontab.
Start monitoring