Every developer has at least one cron job running somewhere — backups, data processing, sending reports. And every developer has had the experience of discovering a cron job stopped running days (or weeks) ago.

The issue: cron doesn't notify you about failures by default. Your 0 2 * * * /opt/backup.sh could silently fail for a month before someone notices.

The Solution

I built CronPing , a lightweight API for monitoring cron jobs:

Sign up — get an API key

Create a monitor — specify the expected interval

Add a ping to your cron job: && curl -s https://cronping.anethoth.com/ping/YOUR_TOKEN

Get alerted via webhook when a job misses its schedule

Example

# Before (silent failure) 0 2 * * * /opt/backup.sh

# After (monitored) 0 2 * * * /opt/backup.sh && curl -s https://cronping.anethoth.com/ping/abc123

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API Design

# Sign up curl -X POST https://cronping.anethoth.com/api/v1/signup \ -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{ "email": "[email protected]" }'

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