Blog
The Cronaut blog
Notes on uptime monitoring, cron and heartbeat checks, status pages, and keeping small projects online without an enterprise budget.
What does 99.9% uptime actually mean?
A plain-English guide to uptime percentages: how much downtime each of the nines really allows, why the math surprises people, and how to think about SLAs without fooling yourself.
How to monitor SSL certificate expiry before it takes your site down
An expired TLS certificate is a full outage that you can see coming weeks ahead. Here is how SSL certificates expire, why auto-renewal is not enough, how to check expiry yourself, and how to monitor it so a renewal never slips.
How to monitor website uptime, and the best practices that make it reliable
A practical guide to monitoring whether your website is actually up: why it matters, how external checks work, and the best practices that stop both real outages and false alarms.
Cron job monitoring best practices
A practical checklist for monitoring cron jobs: report outcomes, watch for the run that never happened, set realistic grace periods, and alert on the right signal.
I stitched three tools together to know if my side project was down. So I built one.
UptimeRobot plus Healthchecks plus a status page is three logins, three bills, and a status page that goes stale. Here is why I built Cronaut to do all three on one engine.
How to know if a cron job actually ran
Your cron job is configured, but did it run? Here is how to check cron logs on Linux, why logs are not enough, and how to get a real answer every time.
Status pages without the busywork
A status page only earns trust if it is accurate during an incident, which is exactly when you have no time to update it. So let the monitoring do it.
A Healthchecks.io alternative that also does uptime and status pages
Healthchecks.io is a clean cron monitor. If you also need uptime checks and a public status page, here is how Cronaut compares and when it is the better fit.
Cron monitoring that catches the job that never ran
A cron job that errors is easy to spot. The dangerous one is the job that quietly stopped running. Here is how heartbeat and deadline monitoring catch both.
Introducing Cronaut: one tool for uptime, cron and status pages
Why we built Cronaut, and how running three monitoring jobs on one check engine lets your status page keep itself up to date.
How to monitor cron jobs and get alerted when one fails
Cron runs your job and forgets about it. Here is a practical way to monitor cron jobs, catch silent failures, and get an alert the moment one stops running.