Ops
Monitor certificate renewals and maintenance scripts
Make sure certbot renew, log rotation, and cleanup jobs actually ran — and hear about it when they don't.
The problem
Maintenance cron is the easiest to forget and the worst to have fail. A certbot renewal that silently stops doesn't surface until certificates expire and your site goes down for everyone at once. The same goes for log rotation, disk cleanup, and antivirus scans — invisible until they aren't.
How SteadyCron solves it
- 1 Create a heartbeat check for each maintenance task on its real schedule (certbot timers, weekly rotations, nightly cleanups).
- 2 Ping on success at the end of the task; ping /fail if the command returns non-zero.
- 3 Set a grace period so a slightly delayed run doesn't alert, but a missed one does.
- 4 Get notified days before a certificate would actually expire — with time to fix it calmly.
# /etc/cron.daily/certbot-renew
TOKEN=<your-ping-token>
if certbot renew --quiet; then
curl -fsS https://ping.steadycron.com/$TOKEN
else
curl -fsS https://ping.steadycron.com/$TOKEN/fail
fi
Jobs
| weekly-digest-email | HTTP | 0 9 * * 1 | in 2 days | 3 days ago | ||
| nightly-db-backup | Heartbeat | 0 2 * * * | in 19 h | 5 h ago | ||
| stripe-reconciliation | HTTP | 0 */4 * * * | in 38 min | 3 h ago | ||
| cache-warmup | HTTP | */15 * * * * | in 11 min | now | ||
| search-index-sync | Heartbeat | */30 * * * * | in 6 min | 24 min ago |
| seed-test-data | HTTP | 0 4 * * * | in 14 h | 10 h ago | ||
| preview-env-cleanup | Heartbeat | 0 */6 * * * | in 2 h | 4 h ago | ||
| trial-expiry-sweep | HTTP | 0 6 * * * | — | yesterday |
Every job's status, schedule, and last run — at a glance.
Turn a future outage into a calm ticket
The whole point is lead time. A missed renewal three days before expiry is a five-minute fix; the same renewal discovered at expiry is an all-hands outage. SteadyCron gives you the former.
Works for anything on a timer
certbot, logrotate, disk cleanup, backups verification, reindex jobs — if it
runs on a schedule and matters when it stops, give it a heartbeat.
Related documentation
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