DEV Community

Mahesh K
Mahesh K

Posted on

Cronlight: a dashboard for Quartz.NET that drops into your existing ASP.NET Core app (open source, MIT)

#dotnet #csharp #quartznet #opensource



I've run Quartz.NET jobs for years, and for most of that time I waited for someone to ship a proper dashboard. Eventually I stopped waiting and built the one I wanted. By the time I got serious, the official dashboard had already shipped - but it's Blazor, and Blazor and I never got along. So I kept going, and it became Cronlight: a plain web UI served as static files, with no Blazor or per-user server connection.

Full disclosure: a lot of this was built with AI tools. I drove the design, reviewed the code, argued with the model plenty, and it has unit and end-to-end tests running in CI. I'm not going to pretend I typed it all myself.

It drops into the ASP.NET Core app that already runs your scheduler - your scheduler, no connection string or schema of its own, never a second scheduler behind your back.

What it does:

  • Browse, create, and edit jobs (cron, one-time, interval) with the schedule in plain words and next fire times as you type, in any time zone. Pause or resume a job, a group, or everything; run now, run once with different data, cancel a run in flight.
  • Typed forms for your job types via attributes, with required and secret parameters - secrets stay out of the database as configuration references.
  • Execution history (optional package): every run's outcome, error, and log, including a running job's log so far, plus misfires, late starts, success rates, and P95 durations, stored in the Quartz database on SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, or SQLite.
  • Retries, alerts (Slack, Teams, webhook, email), JSON/YAML export and import with a preview of what will change, audit log, OpenTelemetry metrics, health check, OpenAPI, and several schedulers in one app with per-scheduler permissions.
  • An MCP server, plus an "AI mode" where you ask "which jobs failed overnight, and why?" in the dashboard, answered by your app's own model with read-only tools.

Try it in your browser, no sign-up: https://cronlight.pages.dev/demo/

Needs .NET 10 and Quartz.NET 3.13.1+ (any job store). It's pre-1.0, so a minor version can still change options and endpoints.

Tell me what's missing for your setup - clustered schedulers, auth setups, job stores I haven't tested, or UI friction.

Top comments (0)