Notes from the on-call side of things
Practical writing about scheduled jobs, uptime, alert fatigue and the small operational habits that keep systems boring.
How to Set Up Redundant Cron Jobs Across Multiple Servers for High Availability
Learn to implement failover strategies for critical cron jobs using leader election and distributed locking.
Debugging Silent Cron Job Failures: A Step-by-Step Troubleshooting Guide
Your cron jobs are failing without a trace. This guide shows you how to diagnose and fix silent failures that slip past error logs.
Cron Job Monitoring vs Server Monitoring vs APM: Which Do You Actually Need?
Stop throwing monitoring tools at your infrastructure randomly. Here's which monitoring approach actually makes sense for your setup.
Cron expression cheat sheet: syntax, examples, and common mistakes
A practical cron expression reference with five-field syntax, 20+ real examples, special characters explained, platform quirks between Linux crontab and Kubernetes CronJobs, and the scheduling mistakes I've debugged in production.
5 cron job failures that will ruin your week (and how to catch them)
Not all cron failures are the same. The ones that ruin your week are the quiet ones — exit code 0, no errors in logs, and three weeks of empty backup files. Here are the 5 failure modes and how to catch each one.
What is a dead man's switch and why your cron jobs need one
Cron jobs fail in silence — no error, no alert, no signal. A dead man's switch flips the logic: instead of watching for failures, it watches for missing success signals. Here's how to set one up with a single curl line.
How to monitor cron jobs with curl and a heartbeat API
Every heartbeat tutorial says 'add curl to your script.' But wrong flags, wrong placement, or wrong error handling means you're not actually monitored. Here are the patterns that work — and the mistakes I made so you don't have to.
How to monitor Laravel scheduled commands with heartbeat pings
Laravel's scheduler has built-in support for heartbeat pings — most developers just don't know about it. Here's how to use pingBefore, pingOnSuccess, and pingOnFailure to catch silent failures in your scheduled commands.
