Cron job monitoring for missed, failed and stuck jobs

When you need this

Your website can stay online while a nightly import, report or queue cleanup has stopped running. An HTTP check cannot confirm a background job finished. Tickwatch expects a signal on the job schedule and tracks its start, completion and failure separately.

How to connect

1. 1

   Create a cron monitor with the scheduler’s expression and timezone, plus an allowance for late runs.

2. 2

   Save the wrapper below and replace the job invocation in crontab with the wrapped command.

3. 3

   Connect Telegram or email. Verify one successful run, one failure and one missed run using a test job.

Ready-to-use example

Install Bash, curl and uuidgen on the job server. Save the code as /opt/tickwatch-run.sh, replace the ping URL with your own and use the absolute path to your job. Keep the ping key private. The wrapper preserves the job exit code; a failed monitoring request does not interrupt it.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Save as tickwatch-run.sh; run: bash tickwatch-run.sh /path/to/job.sh
if [ "$#" -eq 0 ]; then echo "Usage: $0 command [args...]" >&2; exit 2; fi
PING='https://ping.tickwatch.dev/YOUR_PING_KEY'
RID=$(uuidgen) || exit 1
ping() {
  curl -fsS --connect-timeout 3 --max-time 5 --retry 2 --retry-max-time 12 \
    -X POST "$PING/$1?rid=$RID" >/dev/null 2>&1 || true
}
finish() {
  code=$?
  trap - EXIT
  if [ "$code" -eq 0 ]; then ping ""; else ping fail; fi
  exit "$code"
}
trap finish EXIT
trap 'exit 130' INT
trap 'exit 143' TERM
ping start
"$@"

0 3 * * * /usr/bin/bash /opt/tickwatch-run.sh /usr/local/bin/job.sh

Check before going live

• A nonzero exit code sends /fail. Missing signals are detected after the deadline and grace period.

• Set a maximum runtime to catch a /start signal with no matching completion.

• Check PATH, permissions, working directory and environment for the cron user. Running a command in your terminal does not reproduce that environment.

Common questions