What Healthchecks.io does
Healthchecks.io monitors cron jobs and other scheduled tasks. Each job pings a unique URL when it runs, and you get an alert through email, Slack, SMS, and many other channels when a ping is late.
Healthchecks.io is a monitoring service for tasks that should run on a schedule, such as nightly backups, report emails, SSL renewals, and data imports. It uses the dead man's switch method. You create a check, get a unique ping URL, and make your job send an HTTP request to that URL each time it runs. If the ping does not arrive on time, Healthchecks.io sends an alert.
Each check has a period and a grace time, or you can describe the schedule with a cron expression. A check is new, up, late, or down depending on the time since the last ping, and a notification goes out when it moves to down. The dashboard lists all checks with names, tags, descriptions, and a log of received pings and sent notifications. Public status badges show the state of each tag.
Alerts can go to email, webhooks, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, SMS, phone calls, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, ntfy, Matrix, and more than a dozen other services. It also works for cron-like systems such as systemd timers, Kubernetes CronJobs, GitHub workflows, and Windows scheduled tasks, and for simple server heartbeats. A management API lets you create, pause, and list checks from code.
The Hobbyist plan is free for 20 checks. Supporter costs $5 per month with the same limits, Business is $20 per month for 100 checks, and Business Plus is $80 per month for 1,000 checks. Annual billing saves 20%, and open-source projects and nonprofits can get the Business plan for free.
Healthchecks.io was founded in Latvia in 2015 and is run by Pēteris Caune through his one-person company. The code is open source under the BSD license, so you can also self-host it with Python, Django, and PostgreSQL or MySQL.
Best for
Developers, sysadmins, and small teams who run cron jobs, backups, and background workers and need to know when they stop running.
Not for
Teams that need full uptime monitoring of websites, application performance monitoring, or log analysis.
Questions and answers
How does Healthchecks.io monitor a job?
You add an HTTP request to a unique ping URL at the end of your job. If Healthchecks.io does not receive the ping on time, it alerts you.
How many checks are free?
The free Hobbyist plan monitors 20 jobs with 100 log entries per job. No credit card is required.
How much do paid plans cost?
Supporter is $5 per month with the same limits as the free plan. Business is $20 per month for 100 jobs, and Business Plus is $80 per month for 1,000 jobs.
Can I self-host it?
Yes. Healthchecks is open source under the BSD 3-clause license and runs on Python, Django, and PostgreSQL or MySQL.
Are there discounts for open-source projects?
Yes. Healthchecks.io offers the Business plan free of charge for open-source projects and nonprofits.