Check-Ins

Your Honeybadger account comes with check-ins, a way for the processes running on your servers to report that they are alive. Once configured, should a check-in go missing, Honeybadger will send you an alert to let you know that your process has stopped reporting. This is especially useful for monitoring cron jobs, so you can avoid having a cron job silently fail and go unnoticed.

Check-Ins overview

Setup

Check-Ins can also be configured through your codebase. Read more at our PHP/Laravel and JavaScript integration guides.

When you create a check-in, you can choose whether you want to have Honeybadger watch the process on a specific interval (like every 5 minutes) or via cron schedule. Choosing a cron schedule gives you the option to reliably watch jobs that happen on an irregular interval, like only on weekdays.

With either option you can also specify a grace period, which allows some time for long-running tasks to be completed before Honeybadger sends a notification due to a lack of reporting. For example, if you have a job that reports every hour but can take up to twenty minutes to run, you can specify a grace period of twenty minutes, and Honeybadger will allow up to one hour and twenty minutes to elapse before a notification is sent.

When you create a new check-in, you'll get a URL that you can use to report that your process is alive. For example, if your check-in URL is https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_in/XyZZy, then you can set up a cron job like this:

sh
@hourly /usr/bin/do_something && curl https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_in/XyZZy &> /dev/null

You will also get an email address you can use for reporting the status of your process. No subject or body text is required, but the email address is case-sensitive:

sh
@hourly /usr/bin/do_something && echo mail "" | XyZZy@report.hbchk.in

Slugs

If you choose to specify a slug, you will have another URL you can use for reporting the check-in in addition to the URL described previously. This URL includes a project API key to scope the slug to your project. If you specify a slug of hourly-check, then your alternate check-in URL will look like https://api.honeybadger.io/v1/check_in/hbp_ABC/hourly-check.

Notifications

When your check-in goes missing, we'll notify you with information about which job failed to report on time. You can enable or disable these notifications along with the rest of the notification events in your Personal Alerts or Project Integrations settings.