Monitoring for your nightly backups, weekly reports, cron jobs and background tasks.

Make HTTP requests to the Ping URL at regular intervals. When the URL is not pinged on time, Unical Healthchecks will send you an alert. You can monitor any service that can make HTTP requests or send emails.

For each of your periodic tasks, Unical Healthchecks provides an unique URL similar to this one:

https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da
# m h dom mon dow command
  8 6 *   *   *   /home/user/backup.sh && curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 5 -o /dev/null https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da
# using curl (10 second timeout, retry up to 5 times):
curl -m 10 --retry 5 https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da
# using wget (10 second timeout, retry up to 5 times):
wget https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da -T 10 -t 5 -O /dev/null
# Using Python 3 standard library:
import socket
import urllib.request

try:
    urllib.request.urlopen("https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da", timeout=10)
except socket.error as e:
    # Log ping failure here...
    print("Ping failed: %s" % e)
# Using the requests library:
import requests

try:
    requests.get("https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da", timeout=10)
except requests.RequestException as e:
    # Log ping failure here...
    print("Ping failed: %s" % e)
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'

Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse('https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da'))
var https = require('https');
https.get("https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da");
package main

import "fmt"
import "net/http"
import "time"

func main() {
    var client = &http.Client{
        Timeout: 10 * time.Second,
    }

    _, err := client.Head("https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da")
    if err != nil {
        fmt.Printf("%s", err)
    }
}
file_get_contents('https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da');
using (var client = new System.Net.WebClient())
{
       client.DownloadString("https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da");
}
// the server returns appropriate CORS headers so cross-domain AJAX requests work:
var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();
xhr.open('GET', 'https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da', true);
xhr.send(null);
# inside a PowerShell script:
Invoke-RestMethod https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da
# Without an underlying script, passing the command to PowerShell directly:
powershell.exe -command &{Invoke-RestMethod https://healthchecks.unical.it/ping/e333e96f-262d-4ba9-9456-0c85e42cf1da}

A quick peek of what's inside:

My Checks page

Live-updating Dashboard

A list of your checks, one for each Cron job, daemon or scheduled task you want to monitor.

Give names and assign tags to your checks to easily recognize them later.

Tap on the integration icons to toggle them on and off.

Adjust Period and Grace time to match the periodicity and duration of your tasks.

Period/Grace Time dialog

Simple Configuration

Each check has configurable Period and Grace Time parameters. Depending on these parameters and time since the last ping, the check is in one of the following states:
New. A check that has been created, but has not received any pings yet.
Up. Time since last ping has not exceeded Period.
Late. Time since last ping has exceeded Period, but has not yet exceeded Period + Grace.
Down. Time since last ping has exceeded Period + Grace. When check goes from "Late" to "Down", Unical Healthchecks sends you a notification.
Cron dialog

Cron Expression Support

Alternatively, you can define the expected ping dates and times using a cron expression. See Cron Syntax Cheatsheet for the supported syntax features.

Grace Time specifies how "late" a ping can be before you will be alerted. Set it to be a little above the expected duration of your cron job.

Details Page

Details and Event Log

You can add a longer, free-form description to each check. Leave notes and pointers for yourself and for your team.

You can also see the log of received pings and sent "Down" notifications.

Details Page

Public Status Badges

Unical Healthchecks provides status badges for each of the tags you have used. Additionally, the "Unical Healthchecks" badge shows the overall status of all checks in your account.

The badges have public, but hard-to-guess URLs. You can use them in your READMEs, dashboards or status pages.

Integrations
Set up multiple ways to get notified:

Email
 

Webhooks
 

Slack
Chat

Mattermost
Chat

Microsoft Teams
Chat

OpsGenie
Incident Management

PagerDuty
Incident Management

PagerTree
Incident Management

Spike.sh icon

Spike.sh
Incident Management

VictorOps
Incident Management

Zulip
Chat

What Can I Monitor With Unical Healthchecks?

Cron Jobs

Unical Healthchecks monitoring is a great fit for cron jobs and cron-like systems (systemd timers, Jenkins build jobs, Windows Scheduled Tasks, wp-cron, uwsgi cron-like interface, Heroku Scheduler, ...). A failed cron job often has no immediate visible consequences, and can go unnoticed for a long time.

Specific examples:

  • Filesystem backups
  • Database backups
  • Daily, weekly, monthly report emails
  • SSL renewals
  • Business data import and sync
  • Antivirus scans
  • Dynamic DNS updates

Processes, Services, Servers

Unical Healthchecks monitoring can be used for lightweight server monitoring: ensuring a particular system service, or the server as a whole is alive and healthy. Write a shell script that checks for a specific condition, and pings Unical Healthchecks if successful. Run the shell script regularly.

Specific examples:

  • Check a specific docker container is running
  • Check a specific application process is running
  • Check database replication lag
  • Check system resources: free disk, free RAM, ...
  • Send simple, unconditional "I'm alive" messages from your server (or your NAS, router, Raspberry Pi, ...)