Introduction

What is Cronhub?

Cronhub is a painless cron scheduler and monitoring service for developers who don't like working with complicated servers and cron jobs. No servers and ops required.

We created Cronhub to make scheduling and monitoring of recurring tasks a lot easier. Use Cronhub to automate tasks and replace your cronjobs with our schedulers.

We offer two products that complement each other - Scheduler and Monitoring.

I have recorded a quick demo to show some of the features on Cronhub.

What is Scheduler?

As the name implies, Scheduler is a scheduling tool. The schedule can be any time interval or cron expression. Within Scheduler, you define a schedule and a target URL. We send an HTTP request to your Target URL according to your schedule. We do not retry the request if your job fails, and we have a timeout of 3 seconds.

With Cronhub Scheduler, you can focus on your application, and we handle the scheduling part. Let's say you want to send a daily email to your users. You can work on creating the function that handles the email sending part, and we take care of the whole scheduling logic behind the scenes. You just need to tell us where your function lives and how often you want to run it.

What is Monitoring?

Use Cronhub monitors to monitor your cron jobs (or any scheduled jobs). After integrating your job with Cronhub we send you alerts when:

1. Your job doesn't run on schedule (e.g. you have daily running job but it failed to run on time)
2. Your job runs longer than expected (e.g. your job should finish within a minute but it took an hour to finish)

Cronhub supports E-mail, Slack, SMS, Webhook and PagerDuty notification channels.

What is a monitor?

For each job, you need to create a monitor. The schedule of your cron and the created monitor should always match. For instance, if you have a minutely running cron job on your server you should create a monitor and set the cron schedule to * * * * *. Or if you have a job that runs every hour you can create an hourly interval monitor.

What is monitor's ping URL?

When you create a new monitor on Cronhub we generate a unique UUID for your monitor. The ping URL consists of the that UUID and the endpoint. For instance, if you only want to monitor the schedule of your cron job then your ping URL will look like this:

 https://cronhub.io/ping/1f5e3410-254c-11e8-b61d-55875966d031

In this example the UUID is 1f5e3410-254c-11e8-b61d-55875966d031 and the endpoint is /ping.

You will need to make HTTP requests from your job every time it runs. If you want to monitor the running time of the job as well you need to ping twice. At the start of your job and when the job is finished. After receiving the first ping, your monitor is successfully integrated. It will start monitoring your job and notify you if anything is off.

How does alerting work?

If any of your jobs don't run on schedule or run longer than expected Cronhub will alert you. Currently, you can send alerts via Email, Slack, SMS, Webhook and PagerDuty.