Healthchecks is an open-source service for scheduled task monitoring (cron jobs) and heartbeats, written in Python with Django. Its principle is that of a « dead man's switch »: instead of actively checking your servers, it waits for your tasks to « ping » it at regular intervals. If an expected ping does not arrive on time, it deduces that a job has failed and triggers an alert.

In practice, we add a simple HTTP request (or an email) at the end of each task: backup, script, synchronization, application job. Healthchecks detects executions that are late, missing, or failed, and notifies via more than 25 integrations (email, Slack, Telegram, SMS, webhooks…).

The application provides a clear dashboard, an API, monthly reports, team management (projects, members, read-only access), and strong authentication via WebAuthn. Licensed under BSD and easily self-hostable, it is the ideal tool to never discover too late that a critical backup was no longer running.