Healthchecks

Healthchecks is a cron job and background task monitoring service built around simple “ping” URLs. You add a check, instrument your job to call the provided endpoint, and Healthchecks tracks schedules, runtimes, and failures to alert you when something goes wrong.

Key Features

• Ping-based monitoring for cron jobs, one-off scripts, and background workers (success, fail, and start signals)
• Flexible scheduling (period/grace time) with detection of missed runs and late jobs
• Status signals: success, failure, and “start” to detect long-running/hung tasks
• Notification channels including email and multiple third-party integrations (webhooks and chat/incident tools)
• Teams and projects with role-based access for multi-user setups
• Maintenance periods / downtime handling and per-check pause controls
• Check-level API and management UI for creating and maintaining checks
• Timezone-aware reporting and history of pings/runs for troubleshooting

Use Cases

• Alert when backups, database maintenance, or ETL pipelines don’t run on schedule
• Track long-running batch jobs and detect hangs using “start” + timeout
• Monitor periodic health tasks in container/Kubernetes environments via HTTP pings

Limitations and Considerations

• Healthchecks monitors scheduled execution via pings; it is not a full infrastructure/metrics APM system.

Healthchecks is a lightweight, reliable way to get notified about missed or failed scheduled jobs without deploying a full monitoring stack. It works well for ops teams and developers who want simple instrumentation, clear run history, and flexible alert routing.