Big day — cron heartbeats, SMS alerts, and a brand new dashboard
Quick follow-up to last time.
Today was meant to be "finish cron heartbeat monitoring and call it a day". That didn't happen. Three things shipped instead, including the feature I'm most excited about so far.
Here's what's new:
Cron heartbeat monitoring — the fourth cloud-side monitoring feature, and the one I'm most pleased with. It's also the one that's genuinely different from the others — instead of us actively probing your stuff, your scheduled jobs ping us when they run, and we alert if a ping doesn't arrive when expected.
The bit I think we did better than most heartbeat services: instead of giving you a curl command to manually bolt onto your cron line, Observare gives you a setup card on the monitor's detail page where you paste your existing cron line — and we generate the modified version for you to copy back.
There's also an optional version that pings /fail immediately if your job errors, so you don't have to wait for the grace period to expire on a known failure.
Cron expressions only (no "interval" abstraction), full IANA timezone support, configurable grace period, same flapping detection as the other monitor types.
Newly created monitors stay in pending state until the first ping arrives, so no false alerts before you've installed the line on your machine.
SMS alerts — the second big feature. SMS is now a real alert channel alongside email. Add a phone number, we send a 6-digit verification code, you enter it, channel is verified and enabled. From then on, any monitor you've attached the SMS channel to will text you when something breaks.
50 SMS per user per month included on the £5 plan. Hard cap, no overage. Short messages under 160 characters each so they fit in a single SMS. Tested it end-to-end — got the notification on my phone within seconds of triggering a missed heartbeat. Honestly more satisfying than I expected.
A brand new dashboard — the third thing. The old dashboard was a placeholder (three KPI cards and a getting-started checklist). The new one is the page I want to open first thing every morning. Pulsing status hero at the top that shifts colour with the overall state.
Five KPI cards with animated count-up numbers. A live monitor grid grouped by type with pulsing status dots (click any tile to drill in). Two charts side by side — combined 7-day uptime and 24-hour response time.
SSL Watch panel sorted by days remaining. Upcoming Heartbeats panel with live "in Xm Ys" countdowns. Live activity feed at the bottom with type-tagged events (INCIDENT / RECOVERY / HEARTBEAT / FAILURE).
Polls every 15 seconds, one API call returns everything. It's not just prettier — it tells you at a glance whether your stack is healthy. Which is the whole point of a monitoring dashboard.
What's next:
That's all four cloud-side monitoring features shipped. Two more cloud-side features to go before we start on the agent: public status pages (so you can give your users a branded status URL) and Stripe webhook logging & replay (receive, inspect, verify, and replay Stripe webhooks to your dev environment — it's the kind of thing where you only realise you needed it the moment a payment goes wrong).
After those, the remaining items are agent-based — process monitoring, Docker container monitoring, IP and internal port monitoring — all delivered through a small agent users run on their own machines or networks. That's a much bigger lift than anything so far (we're shipping a binary, not just a SaaS feature) so it's going to take longer than the previous features.
By the numbers:
- 4 of 11 planned features live
- 0 paying customers (still pre-launch)
- 4 blog posts published
- 4 days since going public
Beta tester invites are still open — registrations are closed while I finish things up, but if you're a solo dev or freelancer juggling monitoring tools and you'd like early access, get in touch via the contact form at observare.co.uk/contact. I read every message.
What's the moment your monitoring stack last let you down? Always interested to hear the war stories.
