Tickstem
Dead man's switch for your scheduled jobs.
Dead man's switch for scheduled jobs. Ping a URL after each run — get alerted by email if pings stop arriving within the configured interval.
Cron jobs fail silently. A job can stop running entirely — due to a deployment issue, a crashed process, or a silent exception — and you won't know until a user complains or data goes missing. Heartbeat monitoring flips the model: your job pings Tickstem after every successful run, and if the pings stop arriving Tickstem alerts you. No polling, no infrastructure to maintain.
Ping-based alerting
No polling your infrastructure — your job pings Tickstem. Silence means failure.
Grace window
Configure a buffer after the expected ping time before an alert fires, to avoid false positives.
Token-only ping
The ping endpoint requires only the heartbeat token — no API key needed at runtime.
Ping history
Full log of every ping so you can see exactly when a job last ran.
Go SDK
Install with:
$ go get github.com/tickstem/heartbeat
import "github.com/tickstem/heartbeat"
client := heartbeat.New(os.Getenv("TICKSTEM_API_KEY"))
hb, err := client.Create(ctx, heartbeat.CreateParams{
Name: "daily backup",
IntervalSecs: 86400,
GraceSecs: 3600,
})
// At the end of every successful run
client.Ping(ctx, hb.Token)
Also available for
Python and
Node.js.
Plan limits
| Plan | Heartbeat Monitoring |
|---|
| Free | 5 heartbeats |
| Starter | 20 heartbeats |
| Pro | 100 heartbeats |
| Business | Unlimited heartbeats |
See full pricing →
Frequently asked questions
What is a dead man's switch for cron jobs?
A dead man's switch alerts you when something stops happening — the opposite of uptime monitoring. Instead of checking whether your server responds, it checks whether your job is still running. If your scheduled job stops sending pings, Tickstem sends an alert.
What is heartbeat monitoring?
Heartbeat monitoring means your job sends a ping to a URL after each successful run. If the ping doesn't arrive within the expected window, an alert fires. It catches silent failures that uptime monitoring misses — like a job that simply never starts.
How is heartbeat monitoring different from uptime monitoring?
Uptime monitoring checks whether your server is responding to HTTP requests. Heartbeat monitoring checks whether your scheduled jobs are actually running and completing. You need both: uptime tells you your server is up, heartbeat tells you your background jobs are healthy.
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