How to Monitor Cron Jobs Without a Dashboard

The Problem

Cron jobs fail silently. You set one up to charge trials, expire free accounts, or send digest emails — and then it quietly stops working for a week until a user complains.

The Fix

Log the result at the end of every job run. Two events: one on success, one on failure.

import { init } from "logit";

const logit = init({ token: process.env.LOGIT_API_KEY! });

async function runDailyDigest() {
  const start = Date.now();

  try {
    // ... your job logic
    const sent = await sendDigestEmails();

    await logit.now("cron", {
      event: "Daily digest sent ✅",
      description: `${sent} emails sent`,
      icon: "✅",
      notify: false,
      tags: { job: "daily-digest", status: "success" },
      metadata: { sent, duration: Date.now() - start },
    });
  } catch (err) {
    const error = err instanceof Error ? err : new Error(String(err));

    await logit.now("cron", {
      event: "Daily digest FAILED ❌",
      description: error.message,
      icon: "❌",
      notify: true,
      tags: { job: "daily-digest", status: "failed" },
      metadata: { error: error.message, duration: Date.now() - start },
    });
  }
}

With node-cron

import cron from "node-cron";

cron.schedule("0 9 * * *", runDailyDigest); // every day at 9am

With GitHub Actions

yaml

- name: Notify success
  if: success()
  run: |
    curl -X POST https://api.logit.now/api/ingest \
      -H "Authorization: Bearer ${{ secrets.LOGIT_API_KEY }}" \
      -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -d '{"channel":"cron","event":"Job succeeded","icon":"✅","notify":false}'

Tips

Set notify: false on success — you don't need a ping every time it works. Set notify: true only on failure.
Add a duration field to metadata so you can spot jobs that are slowing down over time.