Last updated: 2026-07-19
What Is Heartbeat Monitoring?
Definition
Heartbeat monitoring (also called cron monitoring or dead man's switch) checks that scheduled tasks are running on time. Your cron job or background worker sends a ping to a unique URL when it completes. If the ping does not arrive within the expected window, an alert fires. This catches silent failures that standard uptime monitoring cannot detect because the server itself is still running.
Why it matters
Cron jobs fail silently. Your server is up, your website responds, everything looks fine, but your nightly database backup did not run, your invoice emails did not send, or your data sync is 3 days behind. Heartbeat monitoring catches these failures before they compound into bigger problems: missing backups discovered during a disaster recovery test, or customers who did not get billed this month.
Example
A team ran a nightly database backup via cron at 2 AM. The cron job failed because the disk was full, but no one noticed for 3 weeks. When the database corrupted, they had no recent backup. After adding PingWatchdog heartbeat monitoring, the backup job pings a heartbeat URL on completion. The next time the cron job fails, the team gets an alert within minutes.
How PingWatchdog helps
PingWatchdog heartbeat monitoring gives each scheduled task a unique URL to ping. You set the expected interval (e.g., every 24 hours) and a grace period. If the ping does not arrive, PingWatchdog alerts you via your chosen channels. Every plan includes heartbeat monitoring: 3 monitors on Free, 10 on Solo, 25 on Team.