Cron Job Monitoring

Know the instant a scheduled job misses, stalls, or fails silently

NotiLens monitors your cron jobs and scheduled tasks for missed runs, zero-result completions, unusual durations, and rate anomalies — alerting you before data loss or broken pipelines accumulate.

Works with your scheduler stack
AWS Lambda
Heroku Scheduler
GitHub Actions
n8n
Make
Webhook

Scheduled jobs are the most silent failures in your stack

There's no user-facing error. No exception in Sentry. No alert in PagerDuty. Your cron job just quietly didn't run — and you won't know until you look for data that isn't there.

Cron job silently missed its window

A server restart caused crontab to lose its schedule. Your nightly backup job ran for the last time on Tuesday. You found out on Friday when you needed to restore — and couldn't.

Job ran but processed nothing

The sync completed in 4 seconds. Logs said success. But it processed 0 records — a database connection silently failed mid-run. Three days of data drift before anyone noticed.

Daily report never generated

Your weekly stakeholder report cron silently failed due to a dependency error. The report never arrived in anyone's inbox — and no one noticed until the all-hands meeting.

A watchdog for every scheduled task

NotiLens is the monitoring layer your scheduler doesn't have. Tell it when jobs should run and how long they should take — it handles the rest.

Scheduled task silence detection

Add a single HTTP ping to the end of your cron script. If the ping doesn't arrive within your configured window, NotiLens alerts you — no agent, no daemon, just one line added to your existing script.

Execution time anomaly alerts

NotiLens learns your job's normal execution time. When a run completes too quickly (likely a silent failure) or runs far longer than baseline, you get an alert before it blocks dependent tasks.

Zero-result metric alerts

Send the record count as a metric alongside your ping. If a job completes successfully but processes zero records, NotiLens fires an alert — catching the silent data failures that logs mark as successful.

Rate anomaly detection

If a job that should run once daily fires three times in ten minutes, NotiLens detects the unexpected rate and alerts you before a misconfigured schedule causes duplicate processing downstream.

Timezone-aware windows

NotiLens evaluates silence windows in your configured timezone. A job that runs at 2am UTC and another at 2am EST each have their own topic with independent windows — across different servers and environments.

Per-job team routing

Route backup job failures to infrastructure, report job failures to data teams. Each topic has its own subscribers — so the right person gets paged for the right job, every time.

What NotiLens sends your team

Named job alerts with timing context — so you know exactly which job missed, how late it is, and what the normal expectation was.

NotiLens Live Feed — Cron Jobs
daily-sync-job completed — 0 records processed (normally 500+)
Topic: cron-data-sync • Zero-result alert • 2 min ago
Critical
daily-report missed its 2am window — no ping received
Topic: cron-reports • Silence threshold exceeded • 11 min ago
Warning
data-export-job completed in 4s — baseline is 8 minutes
Topic: cron-export • Duration anomaly • 34 min ago
Warning
daily-backup hasn't confirmed success in 26 hours — expected every 24h
Topic: cron-backup • Silence threshold exceeded • 4 min ago
Critical

Cron jobs don't tell you when they stop running.

There's no built-in failure notification in most schedulers. NotiLens fills that gap — tracking expected run windows and alerting the moment a job goes silent, completes too fast, processes nothing, or fires more often than it should.

How does NotiLens know if a cron job ran? +
Add a single HTTP ping to the end of your cron script: curl the NotiLens webhook URL. If the ping doesn't arrive within your configured window, NotiLens alerts you. No agent, no daemon — just one line added to your existing script. Works with any language, any scheduler, any server.
What's a zero-result alert? +
Some jobs complete successfully but process nothing — a database sync that found 0 rows to process, a report that generated 0 records. NotiLens lets you send the record count as a metric alongside your ping and alert if it hits zero, catching silent data failures that logs mark as successful runs.
Can I monitor jobs on different servers and timezones? +
Yes. NotiLens evaluates silence windows in your configured timezone. A job that runs at 2am UTC and another at 2am EST each have their own topic with independent windows. Each topic can have different subscribers, thresholds, and alert routes — even if the jobs run on completely different servers or cloud environments.
Is this different from a dead man's switch? +
Similar concept, more capable. A dead man's switch just fires if a ping doesn't arrive. NotiLens also lets you track result counts, detect unusual run durations, flag runs that complete too quickly, detect unexpected run rates, and route alerts to different team members based on which job failed — all configurable per topic.

Stop discovering missed jobs in post-mortems

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