Crontab Integration
The simplest way to monitor cron jobs is appending a curl call to your crontab entry.
Basic — ping after job runs
# m h dom mon dow command */5 * * * * /path/to/job.sh && curl -fsS --retry 3 https://watchcron.com/ping/your-uuid
Curl flags explained:
-f fails silently on HTTP errors, -s suppresses the progress bar, -S still shows errors when -s is used, and --retry 3 retries up to 3 times on transient failures.
Using && ensures the ping is only sent if the job exits with code 0 (success). If the job fails, the ping is skipped and WatchCron will flag the check as "down" after the grace period.
With start signal — track duration
*/5 * * * * curl -fsS https://watchcron.com/ping/your-uuid/start && /path/to/job.sh && curl -fsS https://watchcron.com/ping/your-uuid
With failure reporting
*/5 * * * * /path/to/job.sh && curl -fsS https://watchcron.com/ping/your-uuid || curl -fsS https://watchcron.com/ping/your-uuid/fail
Capture job output for debugging
*/5 * * * * OUT=$(/path/to/job.sh 2>&1); curl -fsS --data-raw "$OUT" https://watchcron.com/ping/your-uuid
Capturing and sending job output to WatchCron makes it easy to debug failures — you can see the exact output in the ping details on your dashboard.