What is Heartbeat & Cron Monitoring?

A heartbeat monitor flips the model: instead of Spectra checking your service, your job pings Spectra to say “I ran.” If the expected ping doesn’t arrive in time, Spectra alerts you. It’s the only reliable way to catch a scheduled task that fails to run at all.

Setup

1. Create a heartbeat monitor and set its schedule (an interval or a cron expression) and a grace period.
2. Spectra gives you a unique ping URL, e.g. https://spectrabolt.com/beat/<id>.
3. Call that URL at the end of your job’s success path.

# at the end of your nightly backup
0 3 * * * /usr/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS https://spectrabolt.com/beat/<id>

Start / complete / fail

Send a status so Spectra can tell apart “never ran,” “still running,” and “ran but failed”:

• ?status=start when the job begins
• ?status=complete on success
• ?status=fail on error

This also enables max-duration alerts for jobs that hang.

Notes

• Any HTTP method works (POST, GET, HEAD); the UUID in the URL is the secret, so no auth is needed — keep it private.
• Set the grace period to your job’s real variance so normal jitter doesn’t false-alarm. More on the heartbeat monitoring page.