Monitor cron jobs with heartbeats

Updated July 21, 2026 · 4 min read

Some tasks run in the background and have no public URL: nightly backups, cron jobs, newsletter sends. Heartbeats monitor them the other way around.

How heartbeats work

Instead of Clesk Uptime calling your service, your job calls a unique ping URL once it has finished successfully. If the expected ping is missing, that is, longer than the configured interval plus grace period, we raise an alert. That way you notice when a cron job quietly stalls.

Create a heartbeat

1
Open Heartbeats

Go to Heartbeats in the navigation and create a new heartbeat.
2
Set name, interval and grace

Enter a name, the expected interval in seconds (how often the ping should arrive) and optionally a grace period as tolerance.
3
Copy the ping URL

After creating, a ping URL appears. Copy it and add it to your job.

Using the ping URL

Append the ping URL call to the end of your script or cron job, for example with curl. It only runs if the job succeeded first.

# at the end of the backup script
curl -fsS https://uptime.clesk.space/ping/YOUR_TOKEN

# or straight in the crontab, after the actual job
0 3 * * *  /path/to/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://uptime.clesk.space/ping/YOUR_TOKEN

Keeping an eye on the status

In the heartbeat list you see the status OK, Overdue or New for each job, plus the time of the last ping. If no ping arrives, the heartbeat goes overdue and triggers an alert.

Note

Heartbeats are part of the Pro plan. Without Pro you can see the feature but cannot create heartbeats.

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