Quick Start
Get up and running with Cronping in under 5 minutes.
What is Cronping?
Cronping is a dead man's switch for your scheduled tasks. It monitors cron jobs, background workers, and any periodic process by listening for regular HTTP pings. As long as your job keeps checking in, Cronping stays silent. The moment a ping stops arriving on time, you get alerted — before users notice something is wrong.
What Cronping is great for
- Database and filesystem backups
- Scheduled data imports and sync jobs
- Report generation scripts
- SSL certificate renewal scripts
- Queue workers and background jobs
- DDNS updater scripts
- Any task that must run on a known schedule
What Cronping is not for
- Monitoring website uptime by probing URLs (use an uptime monitor for that)
- Collecting application performance metrics (APM)
- Log aggregation
Get started in 3 steps
1. Create a Heartbeat
In your dashboard, click New Heartbeat and configure:
- Name — a human-readable label (e.g. "Daily DB Backup")
- Schedule — either a fixed interval (e.g. every 24 hours) or a cron expression (e.g.
0 3 * * *) - Grace Time — extra tolerance before an alert fires (default: 5 minutes)
2. Copy the Ping URL
After creating the heartbeat, you'll see a unique ping URL:
https://ping.cronping.com/<token>This token is secret — treat it like a password. Anyone with this URL can send signals to your heartbeat.
3. Add it to your cron job
Append a ping call to your existing cron job command:
# Run your job, then ping Cronping on success
0 3 * * * /usr/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://ping.cronping.com/<token>That's it. Cronping will now alert you if the job stops checking in.
Need more detail?
Read How It Works to understand heartbeat states, schedules, and grace time in depth.
Next steps
- How It Works — understand heartbeat states, ping URLs, and grace time
- Monitoring Cron Jobs — practical crontab examples and tips
- Ping API — full HTTP API reference
- Management API — REST API for programmatic heartbeat management
- Integrations — connect Slack, Discord, Telegram, and more
Learn More
New to here? Don't worry, we are welcome for your questions.
If you find anything confusing, please give your feedback on Github Discussion!