Know when your cron jobs stop running
Add one line to your script. If Alert24 stops hearing from it, you get alerted via email, SMS, Slack, phone call, or push notification — before your users notice.
Three steps. One line of code.
Create a heartbeat check
Select "Heartbeat" as the check type. Set your degraded and down thresholds.
Add one line to your script
Ping your unique URL at the end of each successful run.
Get alerted when pings stop
Alert24 monitors for missed pings. No ping = your job failed = you get alerted.
crontab -e
# Run backup every night at 2am, ping Alert24 on success
0 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS -o /dev/null https://app.alert24.net/api/hb/YOUR_TOKENTwo-tier thresholds: degraded & down
Most tools only have one threshold. Alert24 gives you two — so a late cron job triggers a warning, not a full incident.
Degraded
“It's late but not dead yet.” Service shows as degraded on your status page. Team gets a warning notification.
Example: no ping for 5 minutes
Down
“It's dead.” Service marked as down. Incident auto-created. On-call team gets paged via SMS, phone, and push.
Example: no ping for 15 minutes
Works with anything that can make an HTTP request
Cron Jobs
Nightly backups, database cleanups, report generation, billing runs. Know the moment they silently fail.
0 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -s https://app.alert24.net/api/hb/YOUR_TOKENBackground Workers
Queue consumers, email senders, webhook processors. Detect when they crash and don't restart.
// At end of worker loop
await fetch('https://app.alert24.net/api/hb/YOUR_TOKEN');Scheduled Tasks
Data syncs, cache warmers, certificate renewals. Catch failures before they cascade.
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri 'https://app.alert24.net/api/hb/YOUR_TOKEN' -Method GETHealth Checks
Application heartbeats, service health probes, keep-alive signals from any system.
wget -q -O /dev/null https://app.alert24.net/api/hb/YOUR_TOKENNeed more? Install a Server Agent.
For full server infrastructure monitoring, install a Server Agent. One script monitors CPU, memory, disk, load average, and running services — with threshold-based alerting and auto-incident creation.
# Install on Linux/macOS
curl -sL https://app.alert24.net/agents/alert24-agent.sh -o alert24-agent.sh
chmod +x alert24-agent.sh
./alert24-agent.sh --installSupports Linux, macOS, and Windows (PowerShell). Config via JSON file.
We never access your environment. The agent runs on your infrastructure and communicates outbound only, sending webhooks to your Alert24 endpoint. The full agent script is readable at its install path.
How Alert24 compares
| Feature | Alert24 | Cronitor | Better Stack |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple HTTP ping endpoint | |||
| GET, POST, and HEAD support | |||
| Degraded + Down thresholds | — | — | |
| Auto-create incidents | — | ||
| Auto-update status pages | — | — | |
| Link to on-call escalation | — | ||
| Combined with uptime monitoring | — | ||
| Combined with incident management | — | — | |
| Server Agent with CPU/memory/disk | — | ||
| 15 global check locations | — | ||
| Free tier included | — |
Stop wondering if your cron jobs ran
Free plan includes 5 monitors (heartbeat or uptime), 1 status page, and incident management. No credit card required.