Heartbeat monitoring

A minted URL for anything that runs on its own schedule: a job that goes quiet becomes an alert, not a surprise weeks later.

Included on every plan.

PlansFreeProBusiness

What Heartbeat monitoring catches
What breaks	hostnag
A scheduled job stops runningcron, backups, workers: a heartbeat that goes quiet	Yes

How it works

01
Add the job
A cron run, a backup, a worker: hostnag mints a ping URL for it, no installed software involved.
02
Say how often it should call
An expected interval and a grace period before a missed ping counts as overdue.
03
The job calls the URL when it finishes
One line at the end of its own script, or through the Beacon's config, which can feed several jobs from one file.
04
Silence is the alert
No ping past the deadline raises down, and hostnag says exactly how many minutes overdue it is.

[Critical] Nightly backup missed its heartbeat
nightly-backup has not pinged in time: 25 min overdue. The job may have stopped, hung or lost its way out.
Ping
[Recovered] Nightly backup is pinging again after 1 h 15 min
nightly-backup pinged again. It was silent for 1 h 15 min.
Ping
[Warning] Checks failing for api.example.com
We could not check api.example.com on three consecutive attempts: connect_failed: ECONNREFUSED 203.0.113.9:443.
Cert

Sample alerts, rendered by the same code that writes your email and Slack messages.

Target: a job name, turned into a slug
Expected interval: any number of minutes
Grace period: 0 to 1440min
Status reports: up, down or degraded with a message, optional cadence
Fed by: the ping URL directly, or the Beacon script on a cron or scheduled task

Do I need to install anything on the job's host?

No. One line that calls a URL, or the Beacon, a plain script you can read, schedule and delete yourself.

What if the job wants to report degraded instead of missing entirely?

A status report can say up, down or degraded with its own message; silence past its cadence is a "could not check", never a down.

Add a host. Hear about it first.