Monitor your database backups

The problem

Backups are the classic silent failure. The cron job runs, the dump fails — disk full, expired credentials, a network blip — and nothing tells you. You find out weeks later, mid-incident, when the restore you desperately need turns out to be empty or missing entirely.

How SteadyCron solves it

1. 1 Create a heartbeat check matching your backup schedule (e.g. daily at 02:00) and set a grace period that absorbs normal variance.
2. 2 At the end of your backup script, ping SteadyCron on success — and explicitly on failure if the dump command errors.
3. 3 If the success ping doesn't arrive within the grace period, SteadyCron alerts you via email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, or webhook.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
TOKEN=<your-ping-token>
if pg_dump "$DATABASE_URL" | zstd | age -r "$KEY" > /backups/db.sql.zst.age; then
  curl -fsS https://ping.steadycron.com/$TOKEN
else
  curl -fsS https://ping.steadycron.com/$TOKEN/fail
fi

Every job's status, schedule, and last run — at a glance.

Related documentation

• /docs/heartbeat-monitoring
• /docs/alerting