Cron job and backup monitoring
A backup that silently stopped two months ago is the kind of thing nobody notices until it matters. Give the job a secret address to call when it finishes, and KeenCrow emails you when the call does not arrive on time.
How it works
- In the dashboard, add a scheduled job: give it a name and say how often it should check in, from every 5 minutes to once a week.
- You get a secret address. Add one line to the end of the job that calls it, for example
curl -fsS -m 10 https://keencrow.com/api/ping/your-tokenon Linux, orInvoke-WebRequestin PowerShell on Windows. - Every minute, KeenCrow checks that the last call arrived within the period, plus a tenth of it as slack. When it did not, you get one email, and one more when the job checks in again.
Because the job calls out to KeenCrow, nothing needs to be installed or opened on your server, and it works from a laptop, a home server or a cloud machine alike.
What people use it for
- Database and file backups, and the scripts that copy them off-site.
- Nightly reports, imports and exports.
- Certificate renewals and other maintenance scripts.
- Scrapers, queue workers and bots that are supposed to run all the time and check in every few minutes.
Good to know
- The address is a secret: anyone who knows it can check in for you. Treat it like a password and remove the job to get a new one.
- Each job counts as one of the websites or servers on your plan. Websites, game servers and jobs can be mixed freely.
- Scheduled jobs are part of the Plus and Pro plans.
What it costs
Plus covers 10 websites, servers or jobs for $5 a month. Pro covers 30 for $10 a month. Both can post alerts to Slack or Discord as well as email.