// DEAD-MAN'S SWITCH FOR CRON
Know the moment a scheduled job stops firing.
Cron & scheduled-job monitoring
CronShield sends a heartbeat alert when your cron misses its window — free. Paid tiers read the failing logs and tell you the likely cause, right in the alert.
Free, no login to try · works with GitHub Actions, cron, and more
01 / MONITORING
How does it work?
01
Send a heartbeat
Add one line to your job so it pings a CronShield URL when it finishes. No agent, no config file.
02
Get told when it misses
If the ping doesn't arrive in the window you set, CronShield emails you that the run was missed.
03
See why it failed (paid)
Pro and Team read the failing logs and add the last line and a likely cause to the alert.
02 / GUIDES
Which scheduler are you monitoring?
Answer-first guides with correct config for the failure you're hitting.
03 / FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- How do I know if my GitHub Actions cron actually ran?
- Have the job send a heartbeat ping to a CronShield URL as its last step. If the ping doesn't arrive inside the window you set, CronShield emails you that the run was missed. No ping, no run — you find out in minutes instead of noticing days later.
- What does the free tier include?
- A heartbeat endpoint for your cron and an email alert when an expected ping doesn't arrive, for up to 3 monitored jobs. That is the whole free product — enough to stop a silent job failure from going unnoticed.
- What do the paid tiers add?
- Pro and Team ingest your job's stdout/stderr (or pull the failing GitHub Actions logs) and put a log-aware summary in the alert itself: the last log line and a likely cause. Team also flags whether a failure is recurring across runs or a one-off. This is what Healthchecks.io and Cronitor don't include at this price.
- Which schedulers does it work with?
- Anything that can make an outbound HTTP request on success: GitHub Actions, the Laravel scheduler, Celery beat, a Kubernetes CronJob, a systemd timer, or a plain crontab line with curl.
- How much does it cost?
- Free for heartbeat monitoring and missed-ping alerts. Pro is $19/month and Team is $29/month, billed monthly with no annual lock-in. Cancel anytime.