A dead man's switch for every scheduled job
Heartbeat monitors are passive checks that wait for your jobs to report in.
Each monitor gives you a unique ping URL that accepts GET, POST or HEAD. Add it as one line at the end of your cron job, CI pipeline or backup script, and you are done.
Silence becomes a signal
A job that crashes, hangs or never starts cannot call for help. A missed ping can, and LoadFocus turns it into an alert.
Interval or cron schedule, plus a grace period
Expect a ping every N minutes or hours with a simple interval, or match your exact schedule with a cron expression.
Add a grace period so a job that runs a little long does not page anyone.
Alerts you can trust
You get notified when a job is genuinely late, not every time it takes an extra minute.
Alerts where your team already works
When a ping does not arrive on time, LoadFocus alerts you via email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, PagerDuty, Opsgenie or webhooks.
Recovery is automatic. The next successful ping marks the monitor healthy again, with no manual reset.
From silent failure to clear signal
Instead of discovering a dead job days later, you hear about it within minutes of the missed ping.
Backups, ETL, queue workers and more
Watch nightly backups, ETL and data pipelines, queue workers, certificate renewals and CI pipelines.
If it runs on a schedule and can make an HTTP request, a heartbeat monitor can watch it.
The jobs nobody notices, until they fail
Scheduled tasks fail silently by nature. Heartbeat monitoring makes sure someone finds out.
Free to start, works with everything
Heartbeat monitors are included on the free plan, so you can protect your first jobs today.
There is no agent to install and nothing outbound to configure. Any language or platform that can make an HTTP request works.
Part of a full monitoring platform
Heartbeats live alongside uptime and API monitoring from 26 regions, status pages, dashboards, SLA reports, Monitoring as Code and an MCP server.
Works with any language, platform or scheduler
cron, systemd timers, Windows Task Scheduler, Kubernetes CronJobs, CI pipelines, serverless functions, shell scripts, Python, Node.js, Go, PHP, Java. If it can send an HTTP request, you can monitor it.
Frequently asked questions
What is cron job monitoring?
Cron job monitoring, also called heartbeat monitoring or a dead man's switch, is a passive check that waits for your job to ping a unique URL when it finishes. If the ping does not arrive on time, you get alerted, so silent failures stop going unnoticed.
How do I add heartbeat monitoring to my cron job?
Create a heartbeat monitor, copy its unique ping URL, and add one line at the end of your cron job, for example curl https://.../ping/<token>. The URL accepts GET, POST or HEAD, so it works from any script, CI pipeline or scheduled task.
Should I use an interval or a cron expression?
Use a simple interval when your job runs every N minutes or hours, and a cron expression when it runs on a specific schedule, such as 03:00 every night. Either way, a grace period gives the job time to finish before an alert fires.
Are heartbeat monitors free?
Yes, heartbeat monitors are included on the free plan. You can start monitoring your cron jobs, backups and scheduled tasks without a credit card.
What happens when a job is late?
When the expected ping does not arrive within the schedule plus the grace period, LoadFocus alerts you via email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, PagerDuty, Opsgenie or webhooks. Recovery is automatic, the next successful ping marks the monitor healthy again.
Can I monitor more than cron jobs?
Yes. Anything that runs on a schedule and can make an HTTP request can ping a heartbeat monitor: CI pipelines, backup scripts, ETL jobs, queue workers, certificate renewals and scheduled tasks on any platform. No agent is needed.
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