Honeybadger

Cron Job & Heartbeat Monitoring

Monitor anything with a heartbeat

Honeybadger's check-ins monitor your cron jobs, background jobs, and services to make sure they don't quietly disappear.

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Check-ins dashboard showing reporting and missing tasks

Quiet for all the right reasons

Remember the last time the monthly backup failed, an important email wasn't sent, or some customers didn't get billed? Did your monitoring service alert you, or was it missing in action? Honeybadger monitors those critical tasks, so that you'll never miss another silent failure. When Honeybadger is quiet, life is good.

  Check-In Last Seen Expected
Weekly Billing Task is reporting
https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_in/1pMIZ8
a few minutes ago 1 week from now

Monitor anything with a heartbeat

Heartbeat monitoring is easy to set up: we give you a URL, and you call the URL. If we stop hearing from you within the configured time period, we'll alert you. 

curl https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_in/9LI4Zb

Yep, it really is that simple—and there are so many use cases:

  • Add a cron job to check in every minute to keep your servers & hosts alive
  • Check in periodically from your applications and services to make sure they stay online
  • Queue up a regular check-in to know that your job queue is still processing jobs
  • Ping Honeybadger from any 3rd-party service webhook to get notified if events stop flowing
  • Check in every time someone makes a purchase to be sure that orders are processing

You get the picture... Honeybadger can monitor anything you can think of.

Cron jobs fail in interesting ways

Running on time doesn't mean running successfully. Honeybadger captures exit codes, duration, and output automatically—so when something breaks, you'll know exactly what happened. 

@hourly hb run --id XyZZy -- /path/to/backup-script.sh
  • Exit codes — Know if jobs succeed or fail based on their actual return status
  • Duration tracking — Track how long jobs take and alert on slowdowns
  • Output capture — Record stdout and stderr for easy debugging when things go wrong
  • Flexible scheduling — Use cron expressions to match complex schedules
Check-in detail view showing exit code, duration, and captured output

Intelligent integrations & alerts

Get notified instantly via Slack, SMS, email, and our many 3rd-party integrations. Take it to the next level when you combine Honeybadger with PagerDuty and other on-call services.

Slack uptime alert

Surprisingly simple yet versatile

Honeybadger includes everything you need to monitor those quiet corners of your stack.

Heartbeat monitoring

Check-Ins are a surprisingly simple tool to monitor anything from nightly backups to 3rd-party services.

Instant alerting

Get notified instantly when background jobs and services quietly disappear.

Cron scheduling

Use a cron expression to create an advanced check-in schedule or mirror the cron schedule on your server.

Rich execution history

Capture exit codes, duration, and output alongside a detailed history of when your jobs ran.

Loads of integrations

Works with all of the services you already use, including Slack, PagerDuty, and many more.

Honeybadger platform

Unlock our full suite of easy-to-use tools for developers, including uptime monitoring, error tracking, and more.
Check out the docs to learn more
Simplify your life with Honeybadger

Get monitoring done.

Get real-time alerts when code breaks, monitor performance, and fix errors in record time.

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