Guides

Practical, no-fluff notes on monitoring cron jobs, heartbeats, and uptime the right way — the failure modes that catch teams out, and how to catch them first.

• How to know when a cron job silently stops running

  A cron job that never fires produces no error, no log line, and no alert. Here is why silent cron failures happen and how a dead-man's switch catches them.

• Your cron heartbeat is lying to you: exit codes, set -e, and pipefail

  A heartbeat ping that runs regardless of exit code reports success for jobs that actually failed. Here is how exit codes, set -e, and pipefail decide whether your monitoring tells the truth.

• When a 200 OK is a lie: monitoring soft outages

  A page can return HTTP 200 while showing an error, an empty result, or a maintenance notice. Here is how to catch soft outages that status-code monitoring misses.

• How to get a Discord alert when your website goes down (free, no server)

  Route website-down and recovery alerts straight into a Discord channel with a webhook — no email, no phone number, no server to run. Here is exactly how, with the payload format explained.