10 Critical Cron Jobs You Should Be Monitoring Right Now
A practical checklist for DevOps and no-code teams. Use Heartbeat Monitoring (healthchecks) as a Dead Man’s Switch to catch silent failures, overdue runs, and validate outcomes with payload inspection.
What you’ll learn
- Which scheduled jobs are most likely to cause expensive silent failures
- How Heartbeat Monitoring (healthchecks) works as a Dead Man’s Switch
- How to use Overdue and Grace Period to alert reliably (without noise)
- How Payload Inspection improves workflow reliability beyond “ran successfully”
- How to add workflow observability to n8n and Make.com with native integrations
Why these jobs fail silently
“Cron monitoring” usually fails for the same reason cron jobs fail: the signals are internal. When the host is unhealthy, the workflow engine is stuck, or credentials expire, you don’t necessarily get an error that reaches your inbox.
Heartbeat Monitoring (Healthchecks) solves this by requiring an external check-in. If the ping doesn’t arrive, the monitor becomes Overdue and you get an alert. That’s the Dead Man’s Switch model: absence is the signal.
Full API documentation: /api/heartbeat/.
Quick setup (GET): add a success ping
The simplest Heartbeat Monitoring setup is a one-liner at the end of your job.
Example crontab entry:
Better correctness (POST): interval + payload inspection
Many silent failures are bad outcomes: the job runs but produces a wrong or empty result. With Payload Inspection, you can send a few metrics and alert when values look suspicious.
The 10 critical cron jobs to monitor
Use this as a checklist. For each job type, the key idea is:
- Send a heartbeat on success.
- Set a realistic Grace Period.
- Use Payload Inspection to validate the outcome (not just execution).
1) Database backups (and restore tests)
Silent failures: backups upload fails, output is empty, or restores are never tested. Inspect backup size, exported rows, and duration.
2) SSL / certificate renewals
Silent failures: renewal succeeds but reload doesn’t happen, DNS validation breaks, expiry creeps up. Inspect days-to-expiry.
3) ETL / data warehouse loads
Silent failures: the job runs but loads 0 records, schema drift causes partial loads. Inspect loaded vs rejected records.
4) Payment reconciliation / invoice generation
Silent failures: pagination bugs, provider outages returning empty data, partial runs. Inspect invoices generated and totals.
5) User lifecycle cleanup (GDPR deletes, deprovisioning)
Silent failures: queues stall and nobody notices. Inspect processed count and backlog.
6) Security scans / dependency audits
Silent failures: runner issues prevent scans, results never reach the team. Inspect critical count.
7) Dead-letter queue drains / retry processors
Silent failures: DLQs grow slowly, retry workers get stuck. Inspect processed items and remaining backlog.
8) Search index refreshes (OpenSearch/Algolia sync)
Silent failures: sync runs but misses deletes, alias swap fails, auth issues produce empty updates. Inspect indexed and deleted docs.
9) Third-party syncs (CRM/support/analytics)
Silent failures: OAuth token expiry, pagination changes, partial imports. Inspect synced count and errors.
10) Email sending / notification dispatchers
Silent failures: throttling, stuck queues, template bugs affecting subsets. Inspect sent and bounced.
Bonus: start / success / fail for duration + better alerts
For longer jobs, emit a start ping and an explicit failure ping. This improves workflow reliability and makes investigations faster (you’ll see whether it was running, failed, or missed entirely).
Workflow Observability for no-code: n8n + Make.com
For many teams, the “cron job” is actually a scheduled workflow. The monitoring requirement is the same: detect silent failures when the workflow doesn’t run, and validate outcomes when it does.
n8n (self-hosted): Dead Man’s Switch beyond internal logs
Self-hosted n8n can fail in ways where internal error handling never executes (container stuck, host out of disk, stalled workers). External Heartbeat Monitoring is the baseline.
watchflow’s native n8n integration makes it straightforward to emit heartbeats for workflow observability.
Make.com: detect “ran, but did nothing”
Make scenarios can “succeed” while still being wrong: operations limits, timeouts, partial execution. Payload Inspection helps you detect suspicious zeros.
watchflow’s native Make integration reduces setup friction and improves workflow observability for critical scenarios.
Conclusion
Silent failures are inevitable. Missing detection is optional. Start with Heartbeat Monitoring (Healthchecks), then strengthen it with Overdue thresholds, a realistic Grace Period, and Payload Inspection.
Use the examples in /api/heartbeat/ to set up your first monitor.