If you are looking for a hosted cron job monitoring service, good news: there many options to choose from! In this post I’m comparing a selection of the more popular ones: Cronitor, Healthchecks.io, Cronhub, Site24x7, CronAlarm, PushMon and Dead Man’s Snitch. How I picked the services for comparison: I searched for “cron monitoring” on Google and picked the top results in their order of appearance. I was looking specifically for hosted, SaaS-style services.

One class of support requests I get at Healthchecks.io is about occasional failed HTTP requests to ping endpoints (hc-ping.com and hchk.io). Following an investigation, the conclusion often is that the failed requests are caused by a packet loss somewhere along the path from the client to the server. The problem starts and ends seemingly at random, presumably as network operators fix failing equipment or change the routing rules.