I built a simple cron monitor because silent failures caused frustrated users

Hey everyone,

I recently found out a critical background task in my product had been broken for a few days. I only realized it when a user emailed me to ask why the feature wasn't working.

I was monitoring my server uptime, but I wasn't monitoring the actual execution of my scripts.

Existing solutions felt overkill, and I didn't need a complex observability suite. I just needed to know if my code was actually running.

So I built olic.io.

It's a lightweight monitor for cron jobs and automations.

The concept is a simple "Dead Man's Switch.":

1. Create a monitor to get a unique Ping URL.

2. Add a simple HTTP request (like curl) to the end of your script.

3. If we don't hear a heartbeat on time, we alert you immediately.

We support a bunch of different notification channels, including Slack, Telegram, Discord, and Email. The idea is to get the message to the right person at the right place. It works with everything from crontab and Node.js to PHP and Python.

Initially, I built this to solve my own pain, but I want to help other indie hackers and small teams make their products more reliable as well. It's hard to lose users just because a cron job failed silently in the background.

It is free to use. I would love for you to give it a try and let me know what you think.