Healthchecks.io Alternative: Cron Heartbeats Next to Uptime Monitoring

Create a monitor of type heartbeat in the dashboard or through REST API v4. You get a token and a ping URL. Call it with GET, POST or HEAD at the end of the job:

# crontab: nightly backup, ping only on success
0 3 * * * /opt/scripts/backup.sh && curl -fsS -m 10 https://enterno.io/api/heartbeat/YOUR_TOKEN

# report a failure explicitly with a short message
curl -fsS -m 10 "https://enterno.io/api/heartbeat/YOUR_TOKEN?status=0&msg=disk+full"

The monitor turns to a warning state when half of the grace period has passed and raises an incident when the grace period runs out. Schedule profiles let you widen the grace window for known slow hours or holidays. Alerts go to email, Telegram, Slack or a webhook, and the heartbeat can appear on your public status page.

Heartbeats count toward your monitor limit: 10 monitors on the free plan, 150 on Navigator. Details are on the heartbeat monitoring page.

• Free tier for cron. 20 jobs on the free Hobbyist plan, all of them cron checks.
• Richer ping API. Separate start, success, fail and log signals, exit-code reporting, run IDs and measured job duration. Enterno records success and explicit failure, not job duration.
• Ping bodies. POST up to 100 kB of output with each ping and read it in the event log.
• Open source. BSD 3-clause; self-host on Python, Django and PostgreSQL or MySQL. Enterno is a hosted service only.
• Phone, SMS and WhatsApp notification credits on the Business plans.
• Auto-provisioning: a ping to a new slug with create=1 creates the check.

• You also need HTTP uptime, SSL expiry, DNS and domain monitoring and do not want a second tool and a second alert routing setup.
• You want cron jobs and websites on one public status page.
• Your scripts already call one REST API v4 for monitors, checks and webhooks.

If you only monitor cron jobs and want job durations and logs, Healthchecks.io is the better choice. Comparable specialist tools are covered in Cronitor alternatives and Dead Man's Snitch alternatives.

A mixed setup also works: keep Healthchecks.io for jobs where you need run times and logs, and use Enterno heartbeats for the few jobs that should appear on the same status page as your website.

There is no importer for heartbeat checks, so migration is manual but short:

1. Create one heartbeat monitor per job with the same interval and grace period.
2. Replace https://hc-ping.com/<uuid> with https://enterno.io/api/heartbeat/<token> in each crontab or script.
3. Replace /fail pings with ?status=0. Start and log pings have no equivalent; drop them.
4. Run both services in parallel for one full cycle of your slowest job before removing the old checks.

Test the cron expression first with the cron tester.