Missing vs Failed

Most monitoring tools treat all problems the same. CronBeacon distinguishes between two fundamentally different kinds of failures:

Failed

A failed check-in means your job ran and explicitly reported a failure. You sent a check-in with "outcome": "FAILURE".

This tells you: your code broke. You can look at the metadata, check the error message, and debug from there.

Missing

A missing check-in means your job never reported in at all. The expected check-in window passed, the grace period expired, and CronBeacon heard nothing.

This tells you: your infrastructure broke. The cron daemon stopped, the server went down, a deployment broke the schedule, or the job silently crashed before it could report.

Why this matters

Missing failures are the most dangerous kind because they produce zero signal. There's no error message, no log entry, no stack trace. The job simply stops running and nobody knows until a customer complains.

CronBeacon treats these as fundamentally different problems:

• Failed — shown as DOWN — Failed (red)
• Missing — shown as DOWN — Missing (gray)

Different problems require different responses.