Detect a Silently Failed Cron Job with a Heartbeat Monitor
An n8n workflow that expects a 'ping' from each of your scheduled jobs within a window, and alerts you when an expected heartbeat doesn't arrive — catching the cron, backup or ETL job that fails silently, which is the failure mode dashboards never show.
- 1
Expose a heartbeat webhook
A
Webhooknode accepts?job=namepings. ACodenode writes the current time for that job into workflow static data. Your jobs curl this URL on success. - 2
Schedule the watchdog
A separate
Schedule Triggerruns every few minutes to check for overdue jobs. - 3
Find overdue jobs
A
Codenode reads each job's last-seen time and expected max gap; it outputs any job that has exceeded its window without checking in. - 4
Alert on misses
A
Slacknode posts which job went quiet and how long ago it last ran, so you can investigate the silent failure before it snowballs.
Frequently asked questions
How does a job send a heartbeat?
At the end of a successful run, your job makes a simple HTTP request to this workflow's heartbeat webhook with its name. That single line — a curl at the end of a cron script — is all the instrumentation you need.
How does it know a heartbeat is missing?
The webhook records each job's last-seen time. A separate scheduled check compares now against each job's expected interval; if a job hasn't pinged within its window, it alerts. Absence of a signal is exactly what most monitoring misses.
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