Cronitor alternative for cron jobs and uptime in one tool
Logdash watches background jobs with push heartbeats and HTTP endpoints with scheduled checks on the same service, alerting to the same Telegram channel when either one goes quiet.
Cronitor is the best cron monitor there is at the cron part, and that is worth saying before anything else. It parses the schedule you give it, so it can tell you a job never started rather than only that a job failed. The CLI wraps the command, captures the exit code and the output, and a discover command reads a crontab and creates the monitors for you. Fifty jobs across ten boxes is exactly the problem it was built for.
The reason to look elsewhere is usually consolidation. Cron jobs are one of the three things you actually watch. The other two are whether the API is answering and what the logs said at the second it stopped. Running a cron monitor, an uptime monitor and a log tool means three bills, three alert configurations, and three tabs to correlate at the precise moment you have no patience for tabs.
Logdash puts them on one service: a push monitor for the job, an HTTP monitor for the API, and logs and metrics from the same app through an SDK. The heartbeat is a plain POST with no auth header and no body, so it fits on the end of a crontab line without installing a client. One thing to know up front - Logdash expects a heartbeat inside each check window, so push monitors suit jobs that run frequently rather than a weekly backup.
Ping from the crontab line
# Drain the outbox every minute. The && means a failed run stays silent,
# and silence is what trips the monitor.
* * * * * /srv/app/bin/drain-outbox && curl -fsS -m 10 -X POST \
https://api.logdash.io/ping/6710b3f2c9a14e0021d9f8ab
# Same idea from inside a script, after the work is done.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
/srv/app/bin/drain-outbox
curl -fsS -m 10 -X POST https://api.logdash.io/ping/6710b3f2c9a14e0021d9f8ab- 1 Create a push monitor Add a service, switch the monitor to push, and copy the ping URL. The id in that URL is the monitor id and it is the only thing the endpoint needs.
- 2 Append the curl Put it after the command with && so a failed run never reports success. Anything that can make an HTTP request works: cron, a systemd timer, a GitHub Action, a Kubernetes CronJob.
- 3 Comment the job out Disable it for one cycle and let the heartbeat go missing. The monitor records the miss and the Telegram alert arrives telling you the job stopped running, which is the failure mode that never shows up in your error tracker.
Logdash vs Cronitor
| Feature | Logdash | Cronitor |
|---|---|---|
| Schedule awareness | Alerts on a missing heartbeat | Parses the schedule and knows when a run is late |
| Ping shape | One public POST, no auth, no body | Ping URLs with run, complete and fail states |
| Exit code and output capture | Not built | The CLI wraps the command and keeps both |
| HTTP uptime checks in the same tool | Same service, same dashboard | Also included |
| Application logs and custom metrics | Eight SDKs into the same service view | Job output, not application logging |
| Free plan | Five services, checks every 5 minutes | Free tier for a small number of monitors |
| Source code | MIT licensed, public repository | Closed platform, open source clients |
When Cronitor is the better pick
- Your jobs run nightly or weekly. Cronitor knows the schedule and applies a grace period; Logdash wants a heartbeat inside every check window.
- You have a lot of jobs. Reading a crontab and creating the monitors automatically beats pasting curl lines by hand across ten hosts.
- You need to know a run started, ran too long, or exited non-zero, not only that it finished. Logdash sees one ping and nothing around it.
- You want the job output attached to the alert so you can read the traceback without opening an SSH session first.
Moving a crontab across
One line per job. Swap the Cronitor ping URL for the Logdash one and keep the && so a failing command stays quiet instead of reporting a clean run. Two curls on a single line costs nothing, so run both for a week and check they agree about which runs happened. What does not transfer is the schedule parsing, so plan the frequent jobs onto push monitors and leave the nightly ones where they are until you have watched the new alerts fire.
Is there an open source Cronitor alternative?
Logdash is MIT licensed with the code on GitHub. Healthchecks is the other name people give, and it self-hosts in production today, which Logdash does not yet.
Is there a free Cronitor alternative?
Logdash has a free plan covering five services with HTTP checks every 5 minutes. Push heartbeat monitors are a Pro feature, so the free plan gets you uptime checks rather than job monitoring.
Can Logdash monitor cron jobs and websites together?
Yes. A push monitor for the job and an HTTP monitor for the site, on the same service, alerting through the same Telegram channel.
What is the Logdash heartbeat URL?
POST https://api.logdash.io/ping/<httpMonitorId>. It is public, so there is no auth header, no body and no query string to get wrong.