Cron job monitoring with Telegram alerts

When you need this

A “done” message from your script is useful, but its absence is easy to miss in a chat. Tickwatch watches the deadline and sends an alert when a result is missing, a job fails or service recovers. Your job script does not need a Telegram bot token.

How to connect

1. 1

   Create a Telegram channel in notification settings and complete the connection through the Tickwatch bot.

2. 2

   Assign the verified channel to your monitor and check its quiet-hours settings.

3. 3

   Install the wrapper and trigger a failure in a test job. After a successful run, check the recovery message.

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

• Check both test-message delivery and that the channel is assigned to the right monitor.

• Quiet hours skip notifications to that channel rather than queueing them for morning. The incident remains in the dashboard.

• For critical jobs, add email as another channel. Delivery also depends on the external service being available.

Common questions