Dead Man's Snitch nails the dead man's switch concept. CronGuard keeps that reliability and adds richer alerting, a real-time dashboard and execution-time tracking.
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| Feature | CronGuard | Dead Man's Snitch |
|---|---|---|
| Dead man's switch monitoring | ||
| Email alerts | ||
| SMS & WhatsApp alerts | Limited | |
| Execution-time tracking | ||
| Real-time dashboard | ||
| Public status pages | ||
| Free plan | Yes | Limited |
Like Dead Man's Snitch, CronGuard works by expecting a regular check-in (a "snitch") from your job. Miss the window and you get notified. It is the most reliable way to detect a job that silently stopped running.
CronGuard extends that foundation with multi-channel alerts — SMS, WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram and email — so the alert reaches you on whatever channel you actually watch. It also tracks how long each run takes, flagging performance degradation before it becomes an outage.
A real-time dashboard and public status pages round out the package, and the free plan lets you protect a critical job immediately.
You add a unique ping URL to the end of your cron job or scheduled script. Each time the job runs successfully it calls that URL. If CronGuard does not receive the expected ping within your defined schedule and grace period, it alerts you instantly. This is known as a "dead man's switch" — it catches silent failures that traditional monitoring misses.
No. CronGuard works with a single HTTP request (curl, wget, or any HTTP client). There is nothing to install on your server, which means it keeps working even if your entire host goes down.
Yes. CronGuard has a free Developer plan with email notifications and no credit card required, so you can start monitoring a critical job in under a minute.