Monitoring your cron jobs is critical

At Spike, we have a few supercritical cron jobs.

Some use cases of cron for us has been -

1. Send weekly email reports
2. Billing reminders
3. DB backups
4. Bill organisation for the right amount based on active members every month (flexibility to add/remove users and reflect on billing is super important)

Basically cron is important and we need to be alerted when they fail.

There are several tools that will help you with cron monitoring. Here is a comparison chart

What should you setup?

1. Timeouts
2. Insert cron expression to check if cron has executed
3. Alerting upon failure

Crontab.guru is the best cron expression validator out there. It will convert your expression into human-readable format and validate it for you.

How to setup?

Once you have your expression, you can use one of the cron monitoring tools to validate if the cron was executed and run successfully or not.

1. Healthchecks.io ⭐️
2. Cronitor
3. Cronhub

We ourselves use Healthchecks the most and have absolutely no complains in the past year of using it. Quite sure the other products are great too.

Give it a spin and let us know.

ps: Spike integrates with healthchecks.io very easily. We alert you so you can stay on top of your cron jobs execution.