Cron job monitoring

Cron monitors alert you when a scheduled job doesn't run, not just when it fails while running. They work like a dead man's switch: DownCTL expects a check-in from your job on its normal cadence, and if that ping does not arrive inside the allowed window, the monitor becomes overdue.

From a site's Cron monitors tab:

1. Click Add monitor and give it a name.
2. Define the schedule either as a cron expression (e.g. 0 2 * * *) or a simple frequency in minutes.
3. Set a timezone and how many missed runs to tolerate before alerting.
4. Save — DownCTL generates a unique ping URL for the monitor.

Have your job call that URL when it runs. If a ping doesn't arrive within the expected window, the monitor is marked overdue and can trigger a cron job failing alert rule.

Treat the ping token as a credential — there's no auth header on these endpoints, so anyone with the URL can ping the monitor. Keep it in .env or a config value pulled from the environment (as in the Laravel example below), not hardcoded directly in a script or committed to a public repo.

Laravel: if you have bluecapapps/downctl-laravel installed (see error tracking), chain ->cronMonitor() onto a scheduled task instead of calling the ping URL yourself:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schedule;

Schedule::command('reports:daily')
    ->dailyAt('06:00')
    ->cronMonitor(config('downctl.monitors.reports_daily'));

This pings /started, /finished (with measured runtime), or /failed automatically depending on how the command exits. Run php artisan downctl:crons:sync to list every monitored task and confirm its ping URL.

Plain PHP: bluecapapps/downctl-php provides the same lifecycle without the scheduler integration:

$downctl->pingCronStarted('your-ping-token');

try {
    runImport();
    $downctl->pingCronFinished('your-ping-token', ['runtime' => 12.4]);
} catch (\Throwable $e) {
    $downctl->pingCronFailed('your-ping-token', ['failure_message' => $e->getMessage()]);
}

Anything else: call the ping URL directly — see the API reference for the full set of /started, /finished, and /failed variants, plus accepted metadata.

You can also create or update cron monitors in bulk from code instead of the UI — see cron monitor sync in the API reference.

For the broader marketing overview, see cron job monitoring.