Monitoring for DevOps & SRE Teams

A domain expired over a long weekend and nobody found out until Monday

The registrar sent renewal emails to a shared inbox nobody checked. DNS stopped resolving on Saturday afternoon, the site went dark, and two days later the team learned about it from a customer support ticket. Prometheus and Grafana never fired because they monitor what's inside the infrastructure, not whether it's still reachable from the outside.

This is the gap WatchCron fills. External checks for the things DevOps and SRE teams are responsible for but that metrics tools don't cover: cron jobs, uptime, SSL certificates, domain expiration, open ports, and blocklist status. One dashboard, notifications routed to whoever is on call. It won't replace your metrics stack. But the monitors it handles are the ones that slip through the cracks at 2 AM.

DevOps monitoring beyond your metrics stack

Your APM tells you about request latency. Your metrics platform tracks container health. Neither one tells you that a nightly Postgres backup stopped running three days ago, or that your wildcard SSL certificate expires next Tuesday, or that port 5432 on your replica became unreachable after a firewall change.

WatchCron covers these blind spots:

• Cron job monitoring with full cron expression support, not just intervals. The monitor understands 0 3 * * * and knows the job is late if it hasn't pinged by 03:05.
• HTTP uptime checks from outside your network, so you see what your users see.
• SSL certificate and domain expiration alerts before the renewal window closes.
• TCP port monitors on databases, caches, and message queues. Unlimited on every plan.
• Blocklist monitoring for your sending IPs and domains.

Alerts that fit on-call workflows

WatchCron routes notifications through Slack, Telegram, Discord, Microsoft Teams, email, and webhooks on every paid plan. The Pro plan adds SMS, PagerDuty, and OpsGenie. Business adds voice calls. Notifications flow straight into your existing on-call rotation without a middleware layer.

Every down notification includes a one-click acknowledge link. Click it from the Slack message. Done. Repeat notifications stop for 24 hours. If we're being honest, the acknowledge-from-email feature alone justified building the alert system. Most MTTR isn't spent fixing things — it's spent noticing them and logging in to silence the noise.

Need to deploy without false alarms? Maintenance windows suppress alerting for specific monitors during planned downtime. Set the day and time range, and alerting resumes automatically when the window closes.

From alert to status page in one tool

Here's the thing: when a check fails, the alert is only the first step. WatchCron's built-in incident management tracks what happens next. Create an incident, post updates as you work through it, and each update goes out to subscribers on your public status page. Stakeholders see what's happening without flooding your support channels.

One fewer tool in the chain between “something broke” and “customers know we're on it.”

Multiple services and environments, one dashboard

If you provision infrastructure with Terraform or a CI/CD pipeline, monitoring shouldn't be a manual follow-up that gets forgotten. WatchCron's REST API creates and manages monitors programmatically. Platform engineers managing multiple services can script the whole setup.

The project-based structure keeps alert routing separate per environment. A staging deploy failing at 2 AM won't page the production on-call.

SLA reporting without the spreadsheet

Look, when someone asks “what was our uptime last quarter,” the answer shouldn't take half a day to assemble. WatchCron generates uptime reports with percentages, downtime windows, and response times — exportable as PDF, CSV, or a shareable link. Concrete enough to back up an SLA commitment, useful enough for a quick internal review.

If your team sets SLO targets, the uptime data feeds directly into those conversations. Here's how much of the error budget a Saturday outage consumed, here's the uptime calculation. We've watched teams spend half a day building these numbers in spreadsheets for a quarterly review that lasts twenty minutes. That felt like a problem worth solving.

What it costs for a DevOps team

The free plan covers 20 monitors with email and webhook notifications. Slack, Telegram, Discord, and Teams start on Starter at $7/month ($5/month billed yearly) with 75 checks and 3 team members.

Pro includes 250 checks, 10 members, SMS, PagerDuty, and OpsGenie. Business scales to 1,000 checks, unlimited members, and adds voice calls. Port and domain monitors are unlimited on every plan and don't count against check limits.

Pricing is flat. No per-host charges, no ingestion-based billing that grows with your traffic.