Heartbeat & cron-job monitoring

Know when a cron job
stops running.

Your backups and scheduled jobs don't fail loudly — they just go quiet. PylonMon is the dead-man's-switch for them: drop one line in the job, and if it misses its check-in window, you get paged.

Start free — 2-minute setup → How it works

Free forever for 20 monitors · No credit card · No agent to install

# add one line at the end of your backup / cron job:
curl -fsS https://pylonmon.com/hb/your-mon-id

# miss the window, and PylonMon pages you:
🔴 nightly-backup missed check-in — silent for 14m · SLA 10m

How heartbeat monitoring works

1 · PING

Your job checks in

Append a one-line curl to your cron job, backup, or script. It hits a unique URL every time it finishes successfully.

2 · WATCH

We watch the clock

You set the expected window. PylonMon watches from outside your network, so it still notices even if the whole box dies.

3 · PAGE

Silence pages you

Miss the window and you're alerted — email, Slack, Discord, SMS, voice, webhook and more, with escalation ladders. The silence is the signal.

Why a heartbeat catches what nothing else does

An HTTP check tells you a URL is up. It can't tell you the 3am backup silently stopped writing, or a cron job has been failing for a week. A dead-man's-switch flips that around: instead of asking "is it up?", it expects a regular "I'm alive" — and the moment that signal doesn't arrive, you hear about it. It's the only way to catch jobs that fail by simply not running at all.

What you can put a heartbeat on

Backups — database dumps, restic/borg/rsync jobs, offsite syncs.
Cron jobs & scheduled tasks — anything on a timer, on any host or container.
Scripts & pipelines — ETL runs, report generation, cache warmers, queue workers.
Devices & agents — anything that can make an HTTP request when it's healthy.

And it's not only heartbeats — the same account also runs website & server uptime, HTTP/S, TCP, ping, DNS, TLS-certificate and domain-expiry monitors, so your uptime checks and your cron checks live in one place. See every monitor type →

PylonMon vs. rolling your own: a cron that emails you on failure can't email you when it never runs. Off-site heartbeat monitoring is the piece your own scripts structurally can't cover — and it's free for 20 monitors.

Common questions

Do I need to install anything?

No. A heartbeat is a single curl line. HTTP, TCP and ping checks run from our side. There's no agent on your servers.

What does it cost?

Free forever for 20 monitors with 1-minute intervals and heartbeat, HTTP/S, TCP & ping checks. Paid tiers start at $4/mo for 30-second intervals, more monitors, SMS, and extra monitor types. See pricing →

How fast will I know?

As soon as a job misses its window. You set the SLA per monitor, and alerts fire on the first state change — no repeat 2am nagging.

Monitor your first cron job free →

Set up in about two minutes. No credit card.

Know when a cron jobstops running.