Healthchecks Cron Job Monitoring

This is a repackaged open source software product wherein additional charges apply for cloudimg support services.

## Overview

Healthchecks is the popular open source cron job monitoring service - a dead man's switch for your scheduled tasks. Every cron job, backup script, certificate renewal or batch process gets its own unique ping URL; the job requests that URL when it completes. If a ping does not arrive on schedule, Healthchecks flags the check and notifies you by email, Slack, Discord, Telegram, PagerDuty, webhooks and dozens of other integrations. Unlike active uptime probing, this passive model catches the jobs that silently stopped running.

This AMI delivers Healthchecks fully installed and configured, so a complete cron monitoring platform is running within minutes of launch. The current release available is Healthchecks v4.2.

## Why Choose This AMI Over Manual Installation

Deploying Healthchecks from source or via Docker requires configuring Django, gunicorn, nginx, the sendalerts daemon, database storage, and secure credential generation manually. This AMI eliminates that work entirely - you launch an instance and sign in. Compared to hosted SaaS monitoring services, a self-hosted deployment in your own VPC gives you full data residency control and avoids per-check or per-seat pricing at scale. cloudimg provides ongoing 24/7 support for upgrades, SMTP configuration, TLS termination, and notification integrations - support that the open source community project does not offer.

## Application Stack

Healthchecks runs bare-metal from the official release: the Django application is served by gunicorn behind an nginx reverse proxy on port 80, and the alert delivery daemon (sendalerts) runs as its own system service so notifications are sent the moment a check changes state. The database is SQLite on a dedicated data volume, the upstream-supported default for single-node deployments, keeping the appliance lean with no separate database server to manage.

## Secure By Default

On the first boot of your instance a one-shot service generates a fresh Django secret key and a fresh administrator password, unique to that instance, and writes them to a root-only file. The instance's own address is configured as the site root automatically and open registration is disabled, so only the administrator can sign in or invite users. No shared or default credentials ship in the image. This eliminates the risk of default credential exposure common in manual installations.

## Ready To Use

The application, web server and alert daemon are all configured, with the application and its database on a dedicated, independently resizable storage volume. Browse to the instance address, sign in as the administrator, create your first check and add its ping URL to a cron job. To evaluate the product at minimal cost, launch on a small instance type and scale up as your check count grows.

## cloudimg Support

24/7 technical support by email and live chat. Our engineers help with Healthchecks deployment, upgrades, notification integrations, SMTP configuration, TLS termination and database administration. Critical issues receive a one-hour average response time.

## Use Cases

Monitor cron jobs, backups, database dumps, certificate renewals, ETL pipelines and IoT heartbeats in your own VPC. A private, self-hosted alternative to hosted cron monitoring services for teams with data residency or compliance requirements. Ideal for organizations that need full control over monitoring data without sending job execution details to third-party services.

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