Bulk Import

Overview

If you already have cron jobs running in production, you can import them all at once instead of creating heartbeats manually. Cronping parses your crontab file or Kubernetes CronJob YAML and creates a heartbeat for each entry with the correct schedule, timezone, and a sensible grace period.

Navigate to Dashboard → Heartbeats → Import to get started, or click the Import button in the heartbeats list.

Supported formats

Importing from crontab

Paste the contents of your crontab file or the output of crontab -l:

# Copy your crontab
crontab -l | pbcopy   # macOS
crontab -l | xclip    # Linux

What gets parsed

• Cron schedule — the five-field expression (min hour dom mon dow)
• Command name — extracted from the command path and used as the heartbeat name
• Timezone — detected from TZ= or CRON_TZ= environment variables in the file
• User field — automatically skipped when present (e.g. root, postgres)
• Comments and env vars — ignored

Example input

CRON_TZ=America/Sao_Paulo

# Database backup — daily at 2am
0 2 * * * postgres /usr/local/bin/backup.sh >> /var/log/backup.log 2>&1

# Stripe billing sync — every 15 minutes
*/15 * * * * root /app/scripts/stripe-sync.py

# Temp file cleanup — Sunday at 3am
0 3 * * 0 root /usr/local/bin/cleanup.sh

# ETL pipeline — weekdays at 8am
0 8 * * 1-5 ubuntu /app/etl/run.sh

This creates 4 heartbeats with America/Sao_Paulo timezone:

Importing from Kubernetes

Paste one or more Kubernetes CronJob manifests. Multi-document YAML (separated by ---) is supported. Only resources with kind: CronJob are processed — other resource types like Deployments or Services are ignored.

What gets parsed

• metadata.name — used as the heartbeat name
• spec.schedule — the cron expression
• spec.timeZone — timezone (Kubernetes 1.27+)
• metadata.namespace and metadata.labels — auto-generated tags (prefixed with k8s)

Example input

apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: database-backup
  namespace: production
  labels:
    app: myapp
    tier: backend
spec:
  schedule: "0 2 * * *"
  timeZone: "America/Sao_Paulo"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: backup
              image: postgres:16
              command: ["pg_dump", "$(DATABASE_URL)"]
---
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: stripe-sync
  namespace: production
  labels:
    app: myapp
spec:
  schedule: "*/15 * * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: sync
              image: myapp:latest
              command: ["python", "stripe_sync.py"]

This creates 2 heartbeats:

Import workflow

# Append to your cron entry
0 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS --retry 3 https://ping.cronping.com/<token>

command:
  [
    "sh",
    "-c",
    "pg_dump $(DATABASE_URL) && curl -fsS --retry 3 https://ping.cronping.com/<token>",
  ]

Grace period inference

Cronping automatically assigns a grace period based on the job frequency:

You can adjust the grace period in the preview table before importing, or later in each heartbeat's settings.