10 Best Cron Job Monitoring Tools in 2024

Cron jobs are a programmer's helper in the automation of repetitive yet critical tasks in the life cycle of every program. That's why they should work as they are expected to. However, we know, that flawless program runs and fairies live in the same realm, and in order to keep the magic alive, we need to check our cron jobs on a regular basis. That is achievable with cron job monitoring.

Cron job monitoring looks after scripts that:

• Make periodic backups
• Scan for viruses
• Update Dynamic DNS
• Reboot servers
• Renew security certificates
• Perform custom, scheduled actions

Advantages of Cron job monitoring:

• Early alerts, preventing catastrophic failures
• Data collecting, enabling you to optimize your software according to specific metrics

To better understand crons, Ubuntu's documentation offers a deep insight into cron jobs, task scheduling and managing.

Best cron job monitoring tools in 2023

Now let's have a look at the selection of cron job monitoring tools for 2023.

1. Better Stack

Better Stack offers a new, radical approach to uptime monitoring. Thanks to a combination of best practices in website uptime monitoring, incident management and downtime communication via status pages,

Losing a vital database backup can cause substantial damage to your project. Tracking your cron jobs and serverless workers can prevent that. You can easily start a cron job monitor using Better Stack's web interface. By configuring essential information such as checking frequency or incident escalation.

Better Stack offers a complex infrastructure monitoring solution. Cron jobs are tracked alongside SSL certificates, ping, DNS, and more.

You will also get your hands on an elaborate incident management solution, including an on-call schedule calendar, flexible incident escalations, and incident audit timeline, so you can quickly get to the root of the issue.

You can get Better Stack for Free in the Basic bundle, suitable for your hobby projects. In the basic subscription, you get free email alerts and 3-minute checks. If you are looking for something more serious, you can try the Freelancer option, with unlimited phone calls, 30 seconds checks, 50 monitors, and a Single-user account. You can always step up your game with the Small Team or Business bundles or reach out for a custom quote.

Main Benefits of Better Stack:

• Multi-location checks
• Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, and phone alerts
• Screenshots & error logs
• Uptime monitoring with Status Pages and Incident management built-in

2. Cronitor

Cronitor covers your backend with continuous monitoring for the cron jobs, pipelines, daemons, and APIs that power your business. Cronitor can take care of multiple cron jobs at once, thanks to an automatic setup that only takes minutes.

With Cronitor, you can monitor basically any kind of cron-job, capture cron job outputs, find out if some jobs are taking longer than usual, fine-tune your preferences and optimize alerting threshold, or get a cron job performance visualization, all without any software required.

Cronitor offers a simple pricing scheme. You can either get it for free in the Hacker subscription, with 5 Monitors, Email and Slack alerts, and 1-month of data retention. The Team/Business bundle is constructed as a pay-as-you-go model. You can also reach out for a custom quote and get the Enterprise bundle.

Main Benefits of Cronitor:

• Heartbeat monitoring
• Uptime monitoring
• SAML SSO
• Different Roles

3. Healthchecks

Healthchecks.io offers a simple yet effective cron job monitoring. It makes an HTTP request to a URL each time your corn job completes. If it does not receive a ping at the expected time, you get an alert. In Healthchecks, you get a Live-updating Dashboard, with checks for every cron job or daemon.

With Cron Expression Support, you can define the expected ping dates and times and specify for how long the system should wait for a ping before alerting you. Everything is well noted in details and event logs, and you also get a public status badge.

You can get Healthchecks.io for free. You can monitor up to 20 jobs, 100 log entries per job, and API access. If you need more power, you can pick from the Supporter, Business, or Business Plus subscriptions ranging from $5 to $80 a month.

Main Benefits of Healthchecks:

• A wide array of integrations like Telegram, Trello, Spike, or Webhooks
• Processes, services, and server monitoring

4. Papertrail

Cron outputs tend to be scattered all over the place. Papertrail helps you centralize them and collects all your cron log files in one location. Thanks to comprehensive monitoring and alerting, you will always be the first to know if anything goes south, and with a live tail and fast search, you can shift through large volumes of events and find the root cause quickly.

You can get Papertrail in plenty of different options, but essentially the price derives from three variables - data volume, search window, and archiving period. Meaning, that you can get 1 GB of data, searchable for one week, archived for one year for $7, 2 GB of data with the same search and archiving period, costs $18, etc. However, if neither of the plans suits your needs, you can build your own plan.

Main Benefits of Papertrail:

• Application Performance Monitoring
• Log Viewer
• Firewall Log analyzer
• Tail Logging

5. Site24x7

Site 24x7's Cron monitoring solution allows you to monitor cron jobs, backups, daemons, batches, or other scheduled tasks. Their monitoring solution requires a no-coding setup. It offers instant alerting and heartbeat monitoring. Apart from that, Site 24x7 offers an All-in-One Monitoring solution for Website, server, Cloud, Network, etc.

Cron monitoring is a part of the Infrastructure pack, inside the Starter bundle for $9 a month. This package gives you 10 Websites monitors, 500 MB of Logs, 1 advanced Microsoft app, Cron, and Kubernetes monitoring. This bundle can be modified thanks to Add-Ons from various options like Log management Add-on with an additional 10, 100, or 1000 GB of logs.

Main Benefits of Site24x7:

• All-in-one monitoring solution bundle
• RUM and Synthetic monitoring
• Uptime monitoring
• Multi-user login
• Application monitoring

6. Cronhub

Cronhub allows you to schedule and monitor your recurring jobs without writing any code. Thanks to Job scheduling, Monitoring, and instant alerts, everything runs as it should, and if it does not, you will know about it.

With Team support, Metric insights, and access to logs, you get an analysis of how your system performs, where it fails, and where you need an improvement. Cronhubs job Scheduler helps you automate tasks without handling the complicated scheduling part, and their Job Monitor sends you alerts in case of any failure.

Cronhub offers affordable plans for everyone. You can get it for free with 1 scheduler, 1 monitor, and email and slack alerts. The Developer's first professional bundle starts at $19 and offers 5 schedulers, 10 monitors, email and slack alerts, and Webhook integration. You can always reach out for the Startup, Business, or Enterprise packages for anything more serious.

Main Benefits of Cronhub.io

• Weekly reports
• Job Scheduler

7. Dead Man’s Snitch

Dead Man's Snitch's cron monitoring setup is straightforward. You get a special URL for each job you want to monitor. To start monitoring, you just have to use curl or your browser to make a request.

With Dead Man's Snitch's architecture, you can monitor for cron, Heroku Scheduler, or any scheduled task. If they don't execute when they should, Dead Man's Snitch, well, snitches them out. Each monitor, or "snitch", has a name and a job to monitor, with an interval threshold for sending notifications. Notifications are also available in mobile apps on iOS and Android.

You can get Dead Man's Snitch for free with just one monitor in their The Lone Snitch/Tiny pricing plan. If you need more snitching, their premium plans start at $5 with the Little Birdy/Small plan, including 3 monitors, Basic intervals, API, "field agent," and unlimited team members. In the more advanced monitoring solutions Private Eye and Surveillance Van, you can get up to 300 monitors, Integrations, Smart Notifications, Error notices, and Enhanced intervals. However, if neither of the plans suits your needs, you can reach out for a custom quote.

Main Benefits of Dead Man’s Snitch

• Mobile App
• Specialized tool

8. Cronboard.io

Cronalarm is currently in a private beta and promises features such as creating and importing schedules, and direct task control using their UI. You can also update task configuration directly from the dashboard, and control command parameters and job dependencies when running a task.

Apart from Cron job management, you are eble to monitor tasks and get notified if a task fails, or does not run at all. Cronboard also promises advanced issue detection features such as memory and performance issues, or scheduling conflicts.

As of today, Cronboard.io is available for free and offers unlimited projects, scheduled tasks, live scheduled management, task metadat support, 2 months of history, 500k requests/month and more. However, bear in mind that it's still in beta, so you should not expect 100% reliablity.

Main Benefits of Cronboard

• Complex, free tool in Beta
• Job management from dashboard

9. WebGazer/Pulse

Pulse is a cron monitoring tool that belongs to the Webgazer Uptime monitoring portfolio. Like most cron monitoring tools, Pulse sends an HTTP request when the cron job runs. Pulse listens to incoming requests and sends you an alert if your cron job doesn't respond in a specified time. On top of that, Pulse can check for your own specific rules.

Pulse also allows you to track your GNU/Linux server performance and, using predefined rules, can compare received data and notify you if something is not by the book. You can also monitor geographically distributed devices and make sure that devices used by your customers, like kiosks or tablets, are working as they are supposed to.

Pulse is a part of Webgazer and is available for free in the Hobbyist package, with one monitor and parameter validation. In the lowest tier premium package, Basic, you get 10 "pulses" or monitors, and with upper ranking tiers, you can get up to 150 pulses in the Business package.

Main benefits of Pulse:

• Uptime monitoring
• SSL certificate monitoring
• Root cause analysis

10. Oh dear

Oh dear allows you to easily integrate cron job monitoring into its more complex monitoring solution. Thanks to comprehensive documentation and examples, you can start heartbeat monitoring. Using powerful integrations in multiple coding languages allows you to use oh dear in any framework or CMS, including Laravel, WordPress, Drupal, and many more. You can also easily deploy it on Linux, Windows, or BSD.

On top of that, oh dear checks global uptime, SSL certificates, detects broken pages and mixed content, or allows you to build public status pages. You can also benefit from its website performance monitoring and notifications integrations, including email, SMS, Slack, Telegram, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Pushover, Webhooks, and more.

Oh dear’s pricing depends on how many websites you want to monitor—starting at 5 for around $10 a month.

Main benefits of oh dear:

• Well written documentation
• A complex Uptime Monitoring solution
• Affordable pricing

Conclusion

In this article, we went through the basics of Cron job monitoring. We explained what a cron job is, why it is so important to monitor it, and the consequences if we overlook their failure. Then we proposed a list of the best cron job monitoring solutions. Try to pick your favorites, take a closer look at them, and hopefully, get a solution that will improve your business the most.

For further reading check our:

• Job scheduling in Node.js
• What is cron monitoring
• Getting started with cron jobs

Article by

Jenda Tovarys

Jenda leads Growth at Better Stack. For the past 5 years, Jenda has been writing about exciting learnings from working with hundreds of developers across the world. When he's not spreading the word about the amazing software built at Better Stack, he enjoys traveling, hiking, reading, and playing tennis.

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