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AppSignal Process Monitoring provides visibility into the state of background processes such as cron jobs. Process Monitoring helps answer questions like: Once configured, AppSignal will track the execution of background processes and scheduled jobs, giving insights into individual runs and notifying you if a process doesn’t notify us of completion. You can configure two kinds of process monitors with AppSignal: cron process monitors and heartbeat process monitors. Use cron process monitors to track the execution of processes scheduled to run at a specific time, such as cron jobs. Use heartbeat process monitors to track the uptime of a process that should run continuously, such as a server application or a background job processor.

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Getting started

First, create a process monitor in AppSignal, setting the expected schedule for your cron job, or the expected interval between heartbeat process monitor events. For example, you can have a process monitor for a scheduled job that should run every hour for at most 20 minutes, or a background job processor that should report a heartbeat process monitor event at most every 5 minutes. Then, configure your scheduled job or background process to send process monitor events to AppSignal. A cron job should send a process monitor event at the start and end of each occurrence, while a background job should send a process monitor event at regular intervals. AppSignal will then track the process monitor events it receives and compare them to the expected occurrences. When AppSignal expects a process monitor event but doesn’t receive one in time, it will notify you as configured in the process monitor, helping you ensure that your application’s vital processes are working as expected.