Health Checks Documentation

Health Checks is a service for monitoring cron jobs and similar periodic processes:

  • Health Checks listens for HTTP requests ("pings") from your cron jobs and scheduled tasks.
  • It keeps silent as long as pings arrive on time.
  • It raises an alert as soon as a ping does not arrive on time.

Health Checks works as a dead man's switch for processes that need to run continuously or on a regular, known schedule. For example:

  • filesystem backups, database backups
  • task queues
  • database replication status
  • report generation scripts
  • periodic data import and sync jobs
  • periodic antivirus scans
  • DDNS updater scripts
  • SSL renewal scripts

Health Checks is not the right tool for:

  • monitoring website uptime by probing it with HTTP requests
  • collecting application performance metrics
  • error tracking
  • log aggregation