u/georgi_tsenov

Had one of those fun discoveries recently: a nightly backup cron had been failing (or not running) for a stretch, and nobody knew. Host was fine, uptime checks were green, no ticket, nothing. Found it only when we actually needed a restore.

Curious how other people handle the "job went quiet" case — not "the server is down", but "the scheduled thing didn't check in".

What are you using in practice?
- Healthchecks / Cronitor / Dead Man's Snitch / something else SaaS?
- Self-hosted (Uptime Kuma push monitors, Prometheus + blackbox/heartbeat, custom scripts)?
- Just mail on failure from the job itself (`MAILTO`, wrapper scripts, etc.)?
- Or do you mostly not bother unless it's a critical path?

Also interested in what actually matters day to day:
- Grace periods vs exact schedules
- Success-only heartbeat vs explicit fail signal
- Email only vs Slack/Teams/PagerDuty
- How many jobs you bother monitoring vs "we'll notice eventually"

Not looking for a product pitch — just war stories and what you'd recommend to a small team that doesn't want another heavy observability stack for a handful of crons.