Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is Cronbee?

Cronbee is software as a service (SaaS), that can you help ensure the proper functioning of scheduled tasks.

It helps IT teams monitor that everything is working as expected without having to manually check server logs to see if tasks ran on-time. This means that IT staff can focus on more important tasks and save precious time and money.

When things don't run properly, your IT team will be alerted and can act before you and your customers notice there is something wrong.

2. How does it work?

You create a monitor that is will capture events sent by your scheduled tasks.

You setup your server or system task to send events to your monitor.

All done!

4. Where I should setup Cronbee?

Cronbee is useful for a lot of use cases:

  • Monitoring that your backup jobs complete.
  • Monitoring that the synchronisation between 2 systems is still working (such as between an ERP and an e-commerce website)
  • Monitoring that a recurring computation is still running (such as computation of analytics or time-series data)
  • Monitoring that your daily, weekly, or monthly automated reports are correctly sent
  • Monitoring that your servers or websites are still running and responding to requests
  • Monitoring that your server's clocks are still at the right hour (yeah yeah, don't laugh! it happened to us!)
  • Monitoring anything and everything that you can imagine, as long as it can generate an API call!

3. When will Cronbee alert me?

Cronbee will create alerts when:

  • Your monitor did not start or was not pinged
  • Your monitor started after the expected time
  • Your monitor started before the expected time
  • Your monitor received an error event
  • Your monitor timed out (The monitor received a start or custom event, but no more events were received)
  • Your monitor started responding again
  • Your monitor received an event after being stopped

All events will appear as notifications in your Cronbee dashboard and the system updates in real-time.

4. Does Cronbee integrate with other services?

Yes! Currently Cronbee supports:

  • Email notifications
  • Slack notifications

More to come!

5. What is a monitor?

A monitor is an agent assigned to a specific scheduled task. It listens for events generated by the task and alerts you if something wrong or unexpected.

6. How do I setup my monitor?

Read the tutorial How to monitor a cron

7. I just want to be alerted if my job isn't running

You can use the simple 'ping' mode of Cronbee.

This works like a watchdog. If Cronbee doesn't receive any events, it will trigger an alert via the notification channels you have set up for your team.

8. I want to know when my job starts and when it ends

Cronbee supports sending named events: You can learn how to take advantage of this feature in this tutorial.

9. I need more help, or I want to know more

You can either read the documentation, or send us a mail at [email protected]