Programming

Been running a handful of scheduled tasks on two VPS instances for about a year now — nightly DB dumps, cache warmers, a couple of data sync scripts. Had everything piped to log files and thought I was covered.

Then last month one of the sync scripts started hanging mid-execution. It never crashed, never threw an error, just... sat there. The log showed the start timestamp but no finish line. Took me four days to notice because I wasn't checking logs daily (who does).

After that I looked into what people use to catch this kind of thing.

What I tried:

Healthchecks.io — solid, does the job. You curl a URL at the end of your cron and if the ping doesn't arrive within the expected window, you get an alert. Simple concept.

I also tested WatchCron which works on the same principle but felt a bit snappier to set up for multiple jobs. Has a dashboard that shows timing patterns across runs, which helped me spot that one of my backup jobs was gradually taking longer each week — would've missed that with just pass/fail alerts.

The pattern that works for me now:

#!/bin/bash
# at the end of each cron script
curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 $MONITOR_URL > /dev/null

If the script hangs or exits early, the ping never fires, and I get a Slack notification within minutes.

One thing I changed — I stopped redirecting cron output to /dev/null. Feels obvious in hindsight but I see it everywhere in tutorials. If your task does fail, you want that output in the mail spool or a log, not gone.

What's your setup for catching silent failures? Curious if anyone's doing something beyond the "ping on success" model — like tracking execution duration or exit codes.