Adding a Cron monitor

Do you have a Cron job that you'd like to monitor on your server to ensure that your cron is running on a regular basis? Our Cron monitoring type allows you to make regular requests from your Cron job to a specific endpoint that we'll provide you and we'll let you know when the requests don't arrive on time.

Let's first look at adding a new Cron monitor to the platform:

1. Log in to your account
2. Tap Monitors (you might need to open the menu first if on a mobile) in the menu
3. Tap on Add Monitor
4. Give your monitor a name and optionally a description
5. Set the monitor type to cron

After adding your cron monitor you'll be given a special cron URL to make GET requests to, you can obtain this from your list of monitors in your account.

Setting the cron interval

Setting up the cron interval correctly is important to receiving the correct up and down monitor alerts for your cron job.

Key points:

• Must be set to a value greater than the interval of your cron job.
• Must be as close to the interval of your cron job.

Let's assume that your cron job runs every minute, you'll need to set the cron interval to Every 3 minutes, any later than this and your monitor may be marked as down.

Sending regular requests

In order for your cron to be correctly marked as up or down we expect your cron to make regular GET requests to the endpoint we generate for you, at least one request per the interval you specified is required, however, additional requests are welcome.

As soon as an amount of time passes based on your cron interval in which we never received a request, your monitor will be marked as down, once we receive a new request your monitor will be marked as up at the next available check interval.

Since cron jobs cannot run faster than once per minute we've imposed some rate limiting on the endpoint where you'll be sending requests to, if you hit the endpoint too many times within a minute you'll have to wait a minute before trying again, you'll receive a 429 error code when this happens.

Limits

• You can only send a maximum of 10 requests per minute.

Troubleshooting

If you've recently just added a cron monitor and have only just plugged it in to your cron then your cron monitor won't be marked as up until we receive the first request, after this your monitor will be marked based on the time difference between each request and your cron interval.

If you're experiencing monitor down alerts often and cannot update your cron job's interval, please try changing the cron interval within the monitor.

Finally, if you've got any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to us via our contact methods and we'll be happy to help.