Alerting

CronBeacon doesn't fire an alert the instant something looks wrong. It uses a deliberate process to minimize noise.

Grace period

Every monitor has a grace period — the amount of time CronBeacon waits after the expected check-in time before considering the job missing. If your job usually takes 2 minutes, set a 5-minute grace period so normal execution time doesn't trigger false alerts.

Delayed alerts

When an incident opens, CronBeacon schedules an alert but doesn't send it immediately. This gives transient issues time to self-resolve.

Automatic cancellation

If the incident resolves before the alert is sent (because the job recovered on its own), the alert is cancelled automatically. You never see it.

Retries

If email delivery fails, CronBeacon retries with exponential backoff — up to 5 attempts. You don't need to worry about a temporary email provider outage causing you to miss an alert.

Alert channels

Currently, CronBeacon supports email alerts. Slack, webhooks, and PagerDuty are on the roadmap.