--- title: "Heartbeat monitors" url: "https://www.openstatus.dev/changelog/heartbeat-monitors" date: "2026-11-06" author: "openstatus" description: "Monitor cron jobs, backups and workers: your job pings a unique URL, and you get alerted when it stops or reports a failure." category: "monitoring" image: "https://www.openstatus.dev/assets/changelog/heartbeat-monitors.png" --- Heartbeat monitors are now available in every workspace. HTTP checks can't see a job that runs on its own schedule. A heartbeat monitor flips the direction: your job calls a unique ping URL each time it runs, and the monitor goes down when a ping doesn't arrive in time. Pick **Heartbeat** when creating a monitor, set how often the job runs (**period**) and how late a ping may be (**grace period**), then add the ping to your job: ```bash 0 * * * * /path/to/job.sh && curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://api.openstatus.dev/heartbeat/ ``` - **Missed pings:** when the deadline passes, an incident opens and your notification channels are alerted. The next ping recovers the monitor and resolves the incident. - **Reported failures:** ping the same URL followed by `/fail` to go down within a minute instead of waiting for the grace period. - **Ping logs:** each ping shows up in the monitor's **Logs** tab. Send your job's error output as a `POST` body to keep the first 10 KB with the ping, with anything that looks like a secret redacted on a best-effort basis. - **Status pages:** add a heartbeat monitor to a status page like any other monitor. A new heartbeat monitor stays silent until its first ping, so you can create it before the job is deployed. Periods go from 1 minute to 30 days, and each heartbeat counts as one monitor on your plan. You can also manage them through the API with `CreateHeartbeatMonitor` and `UpdateHeartbeatMonitor`. Read the [heartbeat monitor reference](/docs/reference/heartbeat-monitor) or the guide on [what a cron heartbeat monitor is](/guides/what-is-a-cron-heartbeat-monitor).