Cron expression support has been the most requested feature, since the launch of healthchecks.io. Long story short, it’s been implemented and is ready to use! You can now set up a time-based schedule for your checks, using the exact same syntax you use in crontab files.
In this post, we will set up a simple SSL certificate expiry monitoring, using cron, ssl-cert-check script and a fail-safe provided by an external service, healthchecks.io.
When healthchecks.io started to receive more than 1 request per second, it became clear I could not just go on carelessly restarting web servers after code deploys. For a monitoring service, it would be bad form to miss even a few HTTP requests. And, going forward, if the server gets busier, the problem only becomes bigger.
PagerDuty is a well-known incident management system. It provides alerting, on-call scheduling, escalation policies and incident tracking. If you use or plan on using PagerDuty, you can can integrate it with your healthchecks.io account in few simple steps!
I needed a tool to alert me when my cron jobs silently fail. There is already a number of existing services for this, but it seemed like a fun thing to build myself. So I present to you: healthchecks.io. I am using this myself and it has already been useful for me a couple times. Say, a seemingly benign code change in one service causes my batch job to fail 12 hours later, in the middle of night.
