When cron jobs aren’t the only thing to watch
A heartbeat tells you that a job ran. It doesn’t tell you that the website is answering, that the certificate is about to expire or that the server’s disk is full. Teams that look for an alternative often want those in the same place as their jobs, with one set of alert channels and one bill.
What you get for scheduled jobs
- Cron job monitors on a crontab schedule in your time zone, or on an interval from every minute to every week
- A grace period from 1 minute to 6 hours, and a maximum run time from 1 minute to 24 hours
/start,/failand exit codes in the URL, and the job’s output shown with failures- Alerts by email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Google Chat, Mattermost, Telegram, PagerDuty, ntfy, Pushover, webhooks and push notifications, with a recovery notice when the job runs again
- On-call schedules and escalation when nobody acknowledges an outage
And the rest of the stack
- Website uptime and API checks every minute, with every failure confirmed by a second check
- Server monitoring with a small signed agent
- SSL certificate and domain expiry reminders, and DNS monitoring with change history
- Status pages with subscribers, status updates and scheduled maintenance
Switching from Healthchecks.io
List your checks with their schedules and grace times. In Uptimecheck, open Monitors, choose the Cron jobs filter and then New cron job. Choose On a cron schedule or On an interval, enter the same schedule and time zone, and pick the nearest grace period. Copy the ping URL from the page that opens, or create the monitors through the REST API on Professional and Business, which returns each ping URL.
Then replace the old URL in each job with https://app.uptimecheck.com/api/hb/your-token. If a job already pings a start URL or sends its exit code, keep that pattern: add /start, /fail or the exit code to the new URL. Examples for crontab, Laravel, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, systemd and Windows are in cron job ping examples.
Nothing changes at Healthchecks.io. A job can call both URLs for a week while you compare the alerts, then you remove the old one.
A fair comparison
We reviewed this page on October 26, 2026. Check Healthchecks.io’s current plans and features, then compare them with our feature comparison, or open the cron jobs in the live demo.