Heartbeat Monitoring

Heartbeat monitoring (also called cron or dead-man monitoring) alerts you when a scheduled job stops sending its expected "I am alive" signal.

Instead of checking a service from outside, heartbeat monitoring waits for a service to check in. A backup job, cron task, or worker sends a ping to a unique URL each time it runs; if the ping does not arrive within the expected window, an incident is raised.

This is the only reliable way to monitor things that have no public endpoint — nightly backups, data pipelines, and scheduled tasks that fail silently.