How to Monitor Celery Beat and Background Queue Workers

Background workers fail in two silent ways: the scheduler (Celery beat, sidekiq-cron) stops enqueuing periodic tasks, or the workers stop consuming the queue. Both leave the app looking healthy while work quietly piles up or vanishes.

Monitor a periodic task

Ping at the end of the task body so a successful run reports in:

from celery import shared_task
import requests

BASE = "https://api.cronguard.dev/v1/ping/<your-uuid>"

@shared_task
def refresh_reports():
    try:
        do_refresh()
        requests.get(BASE, timeout=10)
    except Exception:
        requests.get(BASE + "/fail", timeout=10)
        raise

Monitor the beat scheduler itself

Schedule a tiny heartbeat task every minute. If its ping stops, Celery beat is down — independent of any individual task:

app.conf.beat_schedule = {
    "heartbeat": {
        "task": "tasks.heartbeat",
        "schedule": 60.0,
    },
}

@shared_task
def heartbeat():
    requests.get("https://api.cronguard.dev/v1/ping/<your-uuid>", timeout=10)

Alerts you won’t miss

Send these pings to CronGuard and set the cadence. If a periodic task or the scheduler stops checking in, you get instant alerts across SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram and email. Free to start.