Dead man's switch for cron jobs and scheduled tasks: each job checks in to a unique URL, and a missed check-in triggers an alert.
Pricing and hosting
- Pricing
- Free plan
- Free plan
- 1 snitch
- Open source
- No
- Self-hosted
- No
- Launched
- 2012
- Status
- Active
- Website
- deadmanssnitch.com
Plans and prices change; check the tool's own site before you decide.
What it does
Cron and heartbeat monitoring checklist
5 of 8 confirmed in Dead Man's Snitch's own documentation. The same checklist is used for every tool in Cron and heartbeats.
- Ping URL Yes
- Grace period Not confirmed
- Cron expressions Not confirmed
- Start and failure signals Not confirmed
- Run duration Yes
- Output capture Yes
- Alert integrations Yes
- API or IaC Yes
Fixed intervals (minute to monthly) and Smart alerts instead of cron expressions or grace settings; exit status and timing via Field Agent
Checked against: deadmanssnitch.com, deadmanssnitch.com (2), deadmanssnitch.com (3), deadmanssnitch.com (4), deadmanssnitch.com (5)
Alternatives to Dead Man's Snitch
Other cron and heartbeat monitoring tools. See all 12.
-
Checkly Synthetic monitoring for developers: API checks and Playwright browser checks written as code, deployed from CI and run from many regions. -
cronalive Heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs with HTTP uptime and TLS expiry checks, plus Laravel, Python and Node packages that create checks from code. -
Cronitor Monitoring for cron jobs, background workers and scheduled tasks that tracks run duration and failures, plus website uptime checks and status pages. -
Drumbeats Cron job, heartbeat and uptime monitoring with incident tracking and status pages, billed by check-in volume rather than monitor count. -
Healthchecks.io Cron job and heartbeat monitoring: each job pings a unique URL, and a missed or late ping sends an alert. The server is open source and can be self-hosted. -
LastPing Dead man's switch monitoring for cron jobs, CI pipelines and AI agents, with an MCP server so agents can set up their own monitors. -
Sitesure Heartbeat and scheduled-task monitoring alongside website uptime, SSL, DNS and domain checks, priced per monitor. -
Uptime Kuma Self-hosted monitor for HTTP, keyword, TCP, ping, DNS, Docker and push checks, with status pages and dozens of notification integrations. -
WatchCron Cron job monitoring with heartbeat pings and alerts, plus hosted cron jobs that call your URLs on a schedule. -
Watchgoose Heartbeat monitoring and status pages for cron jobs, backups and background workers, with an MCP server and free plans for open source projects. - Runitor Command runner for Healthchecks.io: wraps a job, sends start, success or failure pings with its output, and also works with self-hosted Healthchecks.