How to Monitor Cron Jobs in Go (robfig/cron & more)

Go services often schedule background work in-process with robfig/cron or a time.Ticker. That is convenient, but it means the schedule lives and dies with the process — a crash or a deploy that never restarts cleanly takes every job down quietly. An external heartbeat catches it.

robfig/cron

Wrap the job body and ping on start, success and failure:

package main

import (
	"net/http"
	"time"

	"github.com/robfig/cron/v3"
)

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

func ping(suffix string) {
	c := http.Client{Timeout: 10 * time.Second}
	resp, err := c.Get(base + suffix)
	if err == nil {
		resp.Body.Close()
	}
}

func main() {
	c := cron.New()
	c.AddFunc("0 3 * * *", func() {
		ping("/start")
		if err := runBackup(); err != nil {
			ping("/fail")
			return
		}
		ping("")
	})
	c.Start()
	select {}
}

Plain cron calling a Go binary

0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup && curl -fsS https://api.cronguard.dev/v1/ping/<your-uuid>

Alerting

Send the pings to CronGuard, define the expected interval, and get instant SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram or email alerts when a Go job misses its window — with execution-time tracking. Free to start, nothing to install.