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By the end of this guide, you’ll have heartbeat monitors tracking your scheduled jobs, with alerts firing when a job stops running on schedule.
  • DevHelm CLI installed or an API token
  • One or more cron jobs or scheduled tasks to monitor

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The heartbeat pattern

Standard monitors work by checking your service outbound. For cron jobs, the pattern is reversed — your job pings DevHelm after each successful run. If DevHelm doesn’t receive a ping within the expected window, it opens an incident.

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Set up a heartbeat monitor

1

Create the monitor

devhelm monitors create \
  --name "Nightly Backup" \
  --type HEARTBEAT \
  --expected-interval 86400 \
  --grace-period 3600
Config fieldValueMeaning
expectedInterval86400Job runs every 24 hours
gracePeriod3600Allow 1 hour of slack before alerting
2

Get the ping URL

devhelm monitors get <monitor-id>
Copy the pingUrl from the response.
3

Add the ping to your job

Add a curl at the end of your script:
#!/bin/bash
set -e

# Your job logic
pg_dump mydb > /backups/nightly-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql
aws s3 cp /backups/nightly-$(date +%Y%m%d).sql s3://backups/

# Ping DevHelm on success
curl -fsS -o /dev/null https://api.devhelm.io/api/v1/heartbeat/<token>
Using curl -fsS ensures the ping is only sent on HTTP success. If the script fails (set -e), the curl never runs and DevHelm eventually alerts.

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Common intervals

JobexpectedIntervalgracePeriod
Every minute6030
Hourly3600300 (5 min)
Daily864003600 (1 hour)
Weekly60480086400 (1 day)

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Advanced patterns

Add a post-completion container or use a completions-based Job with a sidecar:
apiVersion: batch/v1
kind: CronJob
metadata:
  name: nightly-backup
spec:
  schedule: "0 2 * * *"
  jobTemplate:
    spec:
      template:
        spec:
          containers:
            - name: backup
              image: myapp/backup:latest
              command: ["/bin/sh", "-c"]
              args:
                - |
                  /scripts/backup.sh && \
                  curl -fsS -o /dev/null https://api.devhelm.io/api/v1/heartbeat/$HEARTBEAT_TOKEN
              env:
                - name: HEARTBEAT_TOKEN
                  valueFrom:
                    secretKeyRef:
                      name: devhelm-heartbeats
                      key: nightly-backup
          restartPolicy: OnFailure
For workers that process queues continuously, add a periodic heartbeat in the main loop:
import requests
import time

HEARTBEAT_URL = "https://api.devhelm.io/api/v1/heartbeat/<token>"
HEARTBEAT_INTERVAL = 300  # 5 minutes

last_heartbeat = 0

while True:
    message = queue.receive()
    process(message)

    if time.time() - last_heartbeat > HEARTBEAT_INTERVAL:
        requests.post(HEARTBEAT_URL, timeout=5)
        last_heartbeat = time.time()
Define all heartbeat monitors in a single YAML file:
version: "1"
monitors:
  - name: Nightly Backup
    type: HEARTBEAT
    config:
      expectedInterval: 86400
      gracePeriod: 3600
    tags: [infrastructure]

  - name: Hourly Report Generation
    type: HEARTBEAT
    config:
      expectedInterval: 3600
      gracePeriod: 300
    tags: [reporting]

  - name: Weekly Cleanup
    type: HEARTBEAT
    config:
      expectedInterval: 604800
      gracePeriod: 86400
    tags: [maintenance]
Always use set -e or equivalent error handling so the ping is skipped when the job fails. This way DevHelm catches both “job didn’t run” and “job ran but failed” scenarios.

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Next steps

Heartbeat reference

Full heartbeat configuration and assertions.

First alert

Get notified when a heartbeat goes silent.

Monitoring as Code

Manage all heartbeat monitors in YAML.