Healthchecks

Healthchecks is an open-source monitoring service designed specifically for cron jobs, scheduled tasks, and background processes. Unlike traditional uptime monitoring tools that check if websites are accessible, Healthchecks monitors whether your periodic jobs actually run when they're supposed to. By expecting regular pings from your tasks, Healthchecks can immediately detect when a backup job fails, a data synchronization process hangs, or a scheduled report doesn't generate. With support for over 50 notification channels and a simple HTTP-based ping API, Healthchecks has become the standard solution for job monitoring, trusted by thousands of developers and operations teams worldwide.

Common Use Cases

DevOps teams use Healthchecks to monitor critical backup jobs, database maintenance tasks, and system cleanup scripts, receiving instant Slack or PagerDuty alerts when jobs fail or take too long to complete. System administrators rely on Healthchecks to track certificate renewal scripts, log rotation jobs, and security scan tasks across multiple servers, with detailed logs showing exactly when each job ran. Data engineers deploy Healthchecks to monitor ETL pipelines, data synchronization jobs, and scheduled reports, ensuring data flows continue uninterrupted with notifications to multiple channels. Small businesses and freelancers use Healthchecks to monitor website backup scripts, database exports, and recurring maintenance tasks, replacing manual checks with automated monitoring.

Key Features

• Simple HTTP ping API for monitoring any cron job or scheduled task
• 50+ notification integrations including Slack, Discord, Telegram, PagerDuty, Opsgenie
• Email-based monitoring for scripts that can't make HTTP requests
• Flexible scheduling with cron syntax and custom grace periods
• Detailed ping logs showing execution time, output, and exit codes
• Tag-based organization for managing hundreds of checks
• Team collaboration with shared access and notification routing
• Status badges for embedding check status in dashboards
• API for programmatic check creation and management
• Timezone support for accurate scheduling across regions

Why deploy Healthchecks on Hostinger VPS

Deploying Healthchecks on a Hostinger VPS gives you unlimited checks without the per-check pricing of hosted services, making it cost-effective for monitoring dozens or hundreds of jobs. With dedicated resources and PostgreSQL storage, Healthchecks can handle high-frequency pings and maintain detailed logs indefinitely for compliance and debugging. Hostinger VPS provides the reliability critical for monitoring infrastructure—your monitoring service needs to be more stable than the jobs it monitors. Full control over SMTP configuration ensures alert delivery through your preferred email provider, and with all data stored on your VPS, you maintain complete privacy over your operational metrics. This makes Hostinger VPS ideal for running Healthchecks as your centralized job monitoring platform.

Getting Started: Creating a Superuser Account

After deployment, you'll need to create a superuser account to access the Healthchecks admin interface. Connect to your VPS via SSH and navigate to your application directory in /docker/[your-app-name], then run:

Interactive method (recommended for first-time setup):

docker compose run healthchecks /opt/healthchecks/manage.py createsuperuser

This will prompt you to enter an email address and password for your admin account.

Non-interactive method (useful for automation):

docker compose run healthchecks /opt/healthchecks/manage.py createsuperuser --email admin@example.com --password your-secure-password

Alternatively, you can specify the compose file path directly without navigating to the directory:

docker compose -f /docker/[your-app-name]/docker-compose.yaml run healthchecks /opt/healthchecks/manage.py createsuperuser

Once created, you can login to Healthchecks using your superuser credentials and start configuring checks for your cron jobs and scheduled tasks.