Heartbeat Monitoring for Jobs
Instead of AmICited probing your server, your scheduled job calls its own unique ping URL — GET or POST, either works — after every successful run. Miss the expected interval, plus a grace period, and an incident opens automatically — catching the failures regular uptime checks can’t see.
Job Heartbeat Monitoring
A cron job that crashes, a backup that stops running, an import that hangs — none of them hit a public endpoint that ordinary cron job monitoring could check. Heartbeats flip the model into a dead man’s switch: your job proves it’s alive, and AmICited only speaks up when it goes quiet. There is no degraded state here — a heartbeat is pending, up, or down.
- Unique ping URL per job — one line added to the end of a cron job or script, no server-side probing required; an unguessable token is the only trust boundary.
- Expected interval and grace period — interval runs from one minute to 30 days, grace from zero to 30 days, so a job that finishes a little late doesn’t page anyone.
- Alerts to the right people — notification recipients configured per heartbeat, same as any other monitor.
- Catches what uptime checks can’t — nightly backups, scheduled imports and queue workers never get hit by a visitor request.
Heartbeat Status Embeds
The detail page generates copy-ready HTML for a heartbeat: a hidden 1×1 visitor pixel that records a ping just by loading, a live SVG status badge, and SVG availability charts for 24 hours or 90 days — each with a preview before you copy it. Reset the token if a URL leaks, but every sender and embed needs updating afterward, since resetting invalidates the old one.
- Visitor pixel — a 1×1 image that pings on load, for jobs that can’t call a URL directly.
- Live status badge — an SVG that reflects current state wherever it’s embedded.
- 24h and 90d availability charts — the same SVG strips as the dashboard, ready to drop into a README or internal wiki.
- Token reset — invalidates the old ping URL immediately; update every sender before the next expected run.
Heartbeats and Uptime Monitors
Heartbeats catch the background jobs no visitor ever triggers. Uptime Monitors catch the public endpoints those visitors do hit. Run both, and use Maintenance Windows to keep planned work on your active monitors from opening a false incident.
- Active + passive coverage — HTTP, TCP, DNS and Transaction monitors for what’s public, heartbeats for what runs in the background.
- Maintenance Windows for active checks — scope by domain or monitor, one-off or recurring, so planned work on a monitored endpoint never pages anyone.
- Disable a heartbeat directly — for planned pauses on a background job, since maintenance windows don’t cover heartbeats yet.
server probing required — your job does the talking
FlowHunt never has to guess whether a background job ran. The job calls its ping URL; silence past the grace period is the only signal that matters.
See Uptime MonitorsReady to catch the job that silently stopped running?
Free check · 7-day trial · card required