---
title: "Heartbeat & Cron Job Monitoring — Lemwatch Help"
description: "Monitor cron jobs, background tasks, and scheduled scripts with ping URLs."
canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/help/heartbeat-monitoring"
source: "https://lemwatch.com"
---

# Heartbeat & Cron Job Monitoring

> Monitor cron jobs, background tasks, and scheduled scripts with ping URLs.

## Heartbeat & Cron Job Monitoring

 Heartbeat monitoring works in reverse — instead of us checking your service, your service pings us. If we stop hearing from it, we know something is wrong.

### How It Works

- Go to Heartbeats in the sidebar

- Click Create Monitor — give it a name, set the expected interval and grace period

- Copy the unique ping URL

- Add \ curl -fsS --retry 3 https://lemwatch.com/api/heartbeat/your-slug > /dev/null\ to the end of your script

### Configuration

- Expected Interval : How often your job should run (1 min to 24 hours)

- Grace Period : Extra time before we alert (handles natural timing variance)

- Status : Up (pinging on time), Down (missed ping), Pending (never pinged)

### Use Cases

- Cron jobs and scheduled tasks

- Database backup scripts

- Data pipeline stages

- Kubernetes liveness probes

- CI/CD pipeline completion checks


## Related

- [Help centre](https://lemwatch.com/help)
- [Keyword Monitoring](https://lemwatch.com/help/keyword-monitoring)
- [Incident Management Workflow](https://lemwatch.com/help/incident-management-workflow)
- [Lemwatch pricing](https://lemwatch.com/pricing)
- [How does Lemwatch check hreflang tags?](https://lemwatch.com/help/hreflang-monitoring)
- [How Health Scores Work](https://lemwatch.com/help/health-score-explained)