What is Healthchecks.io?
Healthchecks.io is an online service that monitors regularly running tasks like cron jobs and similar periodic processes. It is based on Dead man’s switch technique and uses the following workflow:
- Healthchecks.io receives “pings” or HTTP requests from a cron job or other monitored tasks
- It keeps silent as long as an HTTP request or ping arrives on time
- It raises an alert if a ping or HTTP request is missed
Healthchecks.io helps monitor cron jobs and similar processes with continuous, regular, configurable, and known time intervals like:
- Filesystem and database backups
- Database replication status
- Task queues
- Report generation scripts
- Periodic antivirus scans
- SSL renewal scripts
- DDNS updater scripts
How Does Healthchecks.io Help?
Healthchecks.io is an open-source service that supports monitoring cron jobs and cron-like systems such as Windows Scheduled Tasks, Kubernetes CronJobs, system timers, and more. A failed cron job often has no visible and immediate consequence and hence gets unnoticed for a long time. Healthchecks.io helps teams by notifying them about cron job failure immediately. It enables lightweight server monitoring to ensure that a specific system service or the server is alive.
Key Features of Healthchecks.io
Powerful dashboard
Healthchecks.io offers a live and updating dashboard showing a list of checks for scheduled tasks. It supports features such as tagging checks, toggling integration icons, adjusting Period and Grace Time to match the particular task periodicity.
Easy configuration
Healthchecks.io enables configurable period and Grace Time parameters for each check. Each check is assigned one of the states among New, Up, Late, and Down based on last ping and other parameters.
Cron expression support
Healthchecks.io allows defining the expected ping dates and times using a cron expression, e.g., grace Time specifies how 'late' an HTTP request can be sent before an alert is generated.
Details and Event Log
Users can add a free-form description to each check, add notes and pointers for team reference. They can also view the log of received pings and send “Down” notifications. It also offers status badges for each of the tags used.
