Definition
Heartbeat monitoring (also called cron or dead-man's-switch monitoring) flips monitoring around: instead of a service checking your endpoint, your job sends a signal (a "heartbeat") to the monitor when it runs successfully. If the expected heartbeat doesn't arrive in time, the monitor alerts you.
It's designed for background tasks — backups, cron jobs, data syncs, scheduled exports — where the failure mode is something that silently didn't run, rather than a URL that returned an error.
Why It Matters
Some of the most damaging failures are invisible: a nightly backup that quietly stops, a billing job that didn't run. Nothing returns an error because nothing happened. Heartbeat monitoring catches these by alerting on the absence of an expected signal, which uptime checks can't do.
How It Works
You create a heartbeat monitor with an expected schedule (e.g., once every 24 hours). Your job makes a simple HTTP request to a unique URL on each successful run. If the monitor doesn't receive that ping within the expected window plus a grace period, it considers the job failed and alerts you.
Real-World Example
A nightly database backup is supposed to ping its heartbeat URL at 2 AM. One night the backup script errors out before finishing and never pings. The heartbeat monitor notices the missing check-in, waits out the grace period, and alerts the team — who fix the backup before data is at risk.
Best Practices
- Use heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs, backups, and scheduled tasks
- Set a grace period that accounts for normal run-time variation
- Have the job ping only after it completes successfully
- Give each job its own unique heartbeat URL
- Route heartbeat alerts to a channel your team actually watches
Common Mistakes
- Assuming background jobs run successfully because nothing errored
- Pinging at the start of a job instead of after success
- Setting no grace period, causing false alerts on normal variation
- Reusing one heartbeat URL across multiple jobs
- Monitoring user-facing URLs but ignoring critical scheduled tasks
In Monitoristic
Dedicated heartbeat/cron check-ins aren't a standalone Monitoristic feature today — Monitoristic actively checks your endpoints on a schedule rather than waiting for jobs to ping in. For job pipelines, you can still route Monitoristic alerts via webhook into tools like n8n, Make, or Zapier.