Nightly backups
Know whether your database or file backup job completed and checked in after running.
0 3 * * * backup.sh && curl https://cronhealth.io/ping/token
Practical use cases
Monitor the automations that keep your business moving.
CronHealth is useful anywhere a scheduled task should report success: backups, sync jobs, invoices, reports, emails, cleanup scripts, imports, and more.
Common scenarios
Start with the jobs you would hate to discover late.
The best first monitors are the automations where failure is silent, delayed, or expensive.
Payment and subscription syncs
Monitor recurring syncs with Stripe, Paddle, billing systems, CRMs, or third-party APIs.
*/15 * * * * sync-billing && curl https://cronhealth.io/ping/token
Invoice generation
Catch silent billing automation failures before missing invoices become a revenue problem.
0 4 * * * generate-invoices && curl https://cronhealth.io/ping/token
Reports and exports
Make sure daily reports, CSV exports, analytics snapshots, and customer digests still run.
0 8 * * * send-report && curl https://cronhealth.io/ping/token
Scheduled emails
Monitor newsletters, reminders, daily summaries, onboarding emails, and internal notifications.
0 9 * * * send-digest && curl https://cronhealth.io/ping/token
Cleanup and maintenance
Track cache warmups, queue cleanup, temporary file deletion, indexing jobs, and maintenance scripts.
0 */6 * * * cleanup.sh && curl https://cronhealth.io/ping/token
For small SaaS teams
When the app is online, but the workflow is broken.
Many small SaaS incidents are not full outages. Users can still log in, pages still load, and infrastructure looks healthy — but a background automation silently stopped doing its job.
Customer data stops syncing
External CRM, payment, or analytics jobs stop processing new data.
Revenue workflows fail silently
Invoices or subscription syncs fail without taking your website down.
Internal reports disappear
Nobody notices until a stakeholder asks where the report is.
small SaaS monitor examples
# Subscription sync every 15 minutes */15 * * * * php bin/console app:sync-subscriptions \ && curl https://cronhealth.io/ping/subscription-sync # Invoice generation every morning 0 4 * * * php bin/console app:generate-invoices \ && curl https://cronhealth.io/ping/invoices # Daily customer report 0 8 * * * php bin/console app:send-daily-report \ && curl https://cronhealth.io/ping/daily-report
By environment
Use CronHealth wherever scheduled work runs.
Linux servers
Traditional crontab jobs on VPSs, dedicated servers, or internal machines.
Docker containers
Containerized cleanup, import, sync, or maintenance jobs.
App commands
Symfony, Laravel, Node.js, Python, or custom app-level scheduled commands.
CI workflows
Scheduled GitHub Actions or other CI jobs that should run repeatedly.
The best first monitor is usually a backup.
Backups are easy to forget because nothing looks broken when they stop. Start by monitoring one backup job, then add billing, sync, and reporting jobs later.
Monitor name
Nightly Database Backup
Expected schedule
0 3 * * *
Grace period
30 minutes
backup.sh
#!/bin/bash set -e # Create backup pg_dump -U postgres app_db > /backups/app_db.sql # Upload backup rclone copy /backups remote:backups # Ping CronHealth after success curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 \ https://cronhealth.io/ping/your-monitor-token
Choosing what to monitor
A simple rule for deciding.
If you would be unhappy discovering it failed three days later, it deserves a monitor.
Silent failure
The app keeps working, but the background job stops.
Delayed discovery
Nobody notices until data, reports, or backups are missing.
Business impact
The failure affects revenue, customers, operations, or recovery.
Start with one critical automation.
Create a monitor for a backup, sync, invoice job, or report and see whether it keeps checking in.
Start free