Monitor a crontab cron job

Get notified when a scheduled crontab job fails silently — the daemon never fired, the box was down, or the script hung.

A check has a ping URL. Your job calls it on every successful run. If a ping is late past the grace period, CronCanary alerts you. Copy your check's exact URL from its detail page — examples below use $URL.

1. Create a check

In the dashboard, create a check. For a job that runs every night at 4:00, use a Cron schedule 0 4 * * * with your timezone, or a Simple period of 86400 seconds with a grace of 3600.

2. Ping on success

Append a curl to the end of your crontab line. It only runs if your job exited 0 (because of &&):

# /etc/crontab or `crontab -e`
0 4 * * *  /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS $URL

3. Catch failures + hung jobs (optional)

Signal the start, then success — CronCanary measures duration and flags a job that started but never finished:

0 4 * * *  curl -fsS $URL/start && /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS $URL || curl -fsS $URL/fail

Notes

-fsS = fail quietly on HTTP errors but still show real errors.
Cron's PATH is minimal — use the absolute path to curl (/usr/bin/curl) if needed.
Set the check's timezone to match the server so DST shifts are handled correctly.

Ready to wire this up? Create a free check — 20 checks, all alert channels, no card.