Catching the cron jobs that fail silently.
Heartbeat monitoring (dead man's switch) catches cron jobs that fail silently. Learn how it works and why it's the most reliable way to monitor scheduled tasks.
Heartbeat monitoring (also called dead man's switch) is a method for monitoring cron jobs and scheduled tasks. Your job pings a unique URL after it finishes successfully. If the ping doesn't arrive within the expected time window (plus a grace period), the monitoring service alerts you.
This catches all failure modes: the job crashes, the server is down, the crontab is misconfigured, or the job runs but exits with an error. Traditional log monitoring can't detect a job that never ran — heartbeat monitoring can, because it alerts on the absence of an expected signal.
SurePing includes this monitor type on every plan — including the free tier.