Check-ins: 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.

  Check-in Report Period Grace Period Last Seen Expected  
Daily volume email is reporting
https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_in/9LI4Zb
1 day 5 minutes < 1 minute ago 1 day from now View |
|
Project stats is missing
https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_in/j6IW0G
5 minutes None < 5 minutes ago < 1 minute ago View |
|
Weekly exports is reporting
https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_in/yaInB8
@weekly 1 hour < 1 minute ago 3 days from now View |
|

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.

  @hourly 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.

Peace of mind, right on schedule

Copy/paste your cron schedule to monitor tasks that run infrequently, such as a cron job that runs at 9am on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Honeybadger makes sure that it runs on time, every time.

Cron scheduling allows you to use a cron expression to create an advanced check-in schedule or mirror the cron schedule on your server.

You can get pretty advanced—for instance, the schedule "*/30 * * * 1-5" will alert you if you don't check in at 00:00 and 00:30 of every hour Monday-Friday (excluding weekends).

When you set a grace period, Honeybadger gives the job extra time to complete before sending alerts.

Honeybadger also works great with services like Heroku Scheduler!

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.

MISSING: Nightly backups task hasn't checked in for 1 hour.
Project
Majestic Monolith

Surprisingly simple yet versatile

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

Monitor *anything*

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.

Detailed event history

See a detailed history of when your jobs last completed, and when we last heard from your services.

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.

Book your 30-minute demo call

Book a demo with Ben, our co-founder! See how Honeybadger can simplify your monitoring stack and reduce your costs.