Notes from the night shift
Engineering Blog
Technical articles on uptime monitoring, API health checks, and building reliable systems. Written by developers who have been on-call.
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Vercel Cron Jobs Fail Silently: How to Get Alerted with Heartbeat Monitoring
Vercel won't retry a failed cron invocation, and a missed run produces no log at all. Put a dead man's switch on every cron: heartbeat monitoring with period, grace, and output validation.
How to Monitor a Railway App in 2026: Uptime Checks, Cron Heartbeats, and Auto-Restart
Railway's health check runs once, at deploy time. Here's how to actually monitor a Railway app: paste a project token, import your services as HTTP checks, ingest deploy events as incidents, and auto-restart crashed services.
Railway Restart Policy (ALWAYS vs ON_FAILURE) and Auto-Restart on Hangs
Railway's restart policy only fires when the process exits. A hung service stays down until a human notices. Detect the hang from outside and restart automatically, with cooldowns, caps, and an audit trail.
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Follow new articles via RSS- Infrastructure•Jul 9, 2026•8 min read
Vercel Cron Jobs Fail Silently: How to Get Alerted with Heartbeat Monitoring
Vercel won't retry a failed cron invocation, and a missed run produces no log at all. Put a dead man's switch on every cron: heartbeat monitoring with period, grace, and output validation.
- Infrastructure•Jul 9, 2026•8 min read
Railway Cron Jobs: Why Runs Get Skipped and How to Get Alerted
Railway skips a cron run if the previous one is still executing. No error, no log. Heartbeats catch the silence, and Job Chains tell a skipped run from a hung one.
- DevOps•Jul 9, 2026•9 min read
Best Healthchecks.io Alternatives in 2026 (When Ping-or-No-Ping Isn't Enough)
Healthchecks.io does pings well and deliberately nothing else. When you need uptime checks, status pages, and on-call around your heartbeats, here are the alternatives compared honestly.
- DevOps•Jul 9, 2026•10 min read
Integrating AI Agents with uptimyctl: Let Claude Code Run Your Monitoring
Give your AI agent eyes on production: latency analytics for evidence-based diagnosis, monitoring coverage checks in CI, and incident response that keeps the status page updated from first alert to post-mortem.
- Infrastructure•Jul 9, 2026•8 min read
Monitoring Render Apps: Why Health Checks Don't Cover Your Cron Jobs and Workers
Render health-checks web services well. Cron jobs and background workers are the uncovered surface: no did-not-fire alerts. Heartbeats and canary jobs close the gap.
- DevOps•Jul 9, 2026•9 min read
Tired of Self-Hosting Uptime Kuma? The Hosted Path (Without Giving Up Open Source)
Kuma is excellent software with an operational tax: it can't watch itself, probes from one box, and needs upgrades and backups. The honest self-hosted vs hosted decision, plus a hybrid path.
- Infrastructure•Jul 9, 2026•9 min read
How to Monitor a Railway App in 2026: Uptime Checks, Cron Heartbeats, and Auto-Restart
Railway's health check runs once, at deploy time. Here's how to actually monitor a Railway app: paste a project token, import your services as HTTP checks, ingest deploy events as incidents, and auto-restart crashed services.
- DevOps•Jul 9, 2026•9 min read
Railway Restart Policy (ALWAYS vs ON_FAILURE) and Auto-Restart on Hangs
Railway's restart policy only fires when the process exits. A hung service stays down until a human notices. Detect the hang from outside and restart automatically, with cooldowns, caps, and an audit trail.
- DevOps•May 20, 2026•8 min read
What You Get With the Uptimy Free Plan
See what is included in the Uptimy free plan: healthchecks, heartbeats, 5-minute checks, basic alerting, incident management, a public status page, log retention, and one team member.
- Infrastructure•May 14, 2026•7 min read
What Is upti.my-healthcheck/1.0 in My Logs?
Saw upti.my-healthcheck/1.0 in your logs? Learn what this user agent is, why it is hitting your site, whether it is safe, and what to monitor in your own product.
- Infrastructure•Apr 9, 2026•6 min read
Your Cron Job Started. That Does Not Mean It Finished.
Most cron monitoring only checks if a job ran. That misses the failures that actually matter: jobs that start but never finish. Here is how to fix that with Heartbeat Job Chains.
- Infrastructure•Mar 19, 2026•8 min read
How to Monitor Cron Jobs Properly
Cron jobs fail silently by design. Here is a practical guide to monitoring scheduled tasks with heartbeats, timeout detection, and output validation.
- API Monitoring•Mar 15, 2026•6 min read
Why Ping Checks Miss Real Outages and What to Monitor Instead
Ping checks only tell you a host is reachable. Learn what they miss and how to monitor APIs, workflows, cron jobs, SSL, DNS, and real user flows instead.
- Infrastructure•Mar 13, 2026•7 min read
The Hidden Cost of Silent Background Worker Failures
Background workers fail without alerts, without logs, without anyone noticing. Here is what that costs you and how to catch it before your users do.
- DevOps•Mar 11, 2026•8 min read
How to Build a Reliability Stack Without 5 Separate Tools
Most teams piece together monitoring, incident management, status pages, alerting, and automation from different vendors. There is a better way.
- Incidents•Mar 10, 2026•6 min read
What to Put on a Status Page During an Incident
Most status pages are useless during incidents. Here is what to write, when to update, and how to communicate without making things worse.
- Incidents•Mar 7, 2026•8 min read
Incident Response for Small SaaS Teams: A Practical Guide
Learn a lightweight incident response process for small SaaS teams, including severity levels, on-call, customer communication, and fast postmortems.
- DevOps•Mar 5, 2026•7 min read
How to Reduce Alert Fatigue With Smarter Routing
Alert fatigue is not a volume problem. It is a routing problem. Here is how to send the right alerts to the right people at the right time.
- DevOps•Mar 4, 2026•9 min read
What Self-Healing Monitoring Looks Like in Practice
Self-healing is not science fiction. It is a monitoring check that detects a known problem and runs a known fix. Here is how to build it for real systems.
- Security•Mar 2, 2026•7 min read
SSL Certificate Expiry: The Outage Nobody Sees Coming
SSL certificates expire silently. Learn how to monitor expiry dates, validate certificate chains, and automate renewal checks before your site goes down.
- Infrastructure•Feb 25, 2026•8 min read
DNS Monitoring: What Can Go Wrong and How to Catch It
DNS issues are invisible until everything breaks. Learn to monitor propagation, detect hijacking, and catch misconfigurations before users notice.
- DevOps•Feb 18, 2026•10 min read
Self-Healing Infrastructure: A Practical Guide for Small Teams
You don't need a platform team to automate incident response. A practical guide to building self-healing systems with monitoring triggers and recovery workflows.
- DevOps•Feb 10, 2026•6 min read
The Uptime Monitoring Checklist for 2026
A no-nonsense checklist for monitoring your production stack. Covers APIs, databases, DNS, SSL, cron jobs, background workers, and status pages.
- API Monitoring•Feb 1, 2026•6 min read
HTTP 200 Is Not a Health Check: What to Validate Instead
A 200 OK response does not mean your app is healthy. Learn what to validate instead, from response content and dependencies to real workflow checks.
- Protocols•Jan 25, 2026•8 min read
How to Monitor gRPC Services with the Standard Health Checking Protocol
Learn how to monitor gRPC services with the standard health checking protocol, real RPC checks, gRPC status code alerting, and response validation.
- Infrastructure•Jan 18, 2026•7 min read
Cron Job Monitoring: Common Failure Modes
Your nightly backup job failed 3 weeks ago. Here's how to catch silent cron failures before they become disasters.
- Infrastructure•Jan 10, 2026•9 min read
Detecting Silent Failures in Background Workers
Queue workers fail without fanfare. Learn patterns for detecting when your background jobs stop processing.
- Incidents•Jan 5, 2026•5 min read
Status Pages vs Alerts: Real Tradeoffs
When should you update the status page vs. just alerting internally? A framework for incident communication decisions.
- Architecture•Dec 28, 2025•12 min read
Heartbeat Monitoring for Cron Jobs: How to Detect Missed Runs
A practical guide to heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs and scheduled tasks, including grace periods, missed-run alerts, late pings, and hung-job detection.
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