CronVitals – WP-Cron Monitoring & Failure Alerts

Description

A scheduled post didn’t publish. A subscription didn’t renew. Stock didn’t sync. WordPress never told you — WP-Cron fails silently, and by the time someone notices, it’s a client email.

CronVitals is a monitor for WP-Cron. It watches every scheduled job on your site, records every run, and tells you when one breaks.

• See the actual error, not just “something failed.” When a cron job dies on a PHP fatal, CronVitals catches it during shutdown and logs the message, file, and line — the thing that’s normally lost because nobody was watching the request.
• Catch jobs that never ran at all. A configurable threshold (default 15 minutes past schedule) marks a job as missed, so a job that quietly stopped rescheduling shows up as a problem instead of just disappearing.
• Answer “how long has this been broken?” Every run is logged — job, scheduled time, actual run time, duration, pass/fail — with 30 days of history, a reliability score, and a per-job failure breakdown.

How it works

1. Activate. Every registered WP-Cron event is picked up automatically — no list to build, no jobs to register.
2. Set the alert email and the missed-run threshold under Tools → CronVitals. That’s the whole setup.
3. You get an email (rate-limited, never a flood) and a dashboard notice when a job fails or runs late.

What it actually does under the hood

CronVitals attaches to each monitored hook at the outermost priorities to time the run, and registers a shutdown handler to catch fatals that kill the request mid-job. A separate five-minute scan compares each event’s schedule against the clock to find misses. Runs are written to one custom table, pruned to 30 days. It does not modify, reschedule, or remove your cron events — it reads and records.

It works whether WP-Cron runs on page loads or a real system cron hits wp-cron.php, and it keeps working with DISABLE_WP_CRON set. Multisite-aware: each site gets its own table and settings, and sites created after network activation are set up automatically.

Free vs Pro

Everything above is free, on every site, with no caps — unlimited monitored jobs, full 30-day history, unlimited email alerts, and the reliability analytics.

Pro adds the alerting and integrations that teams need:

• WooCommerce / Action Scheduler monitoring — success and failure of Action Scheduler jobs, plus stalled-queue detection
• Slack and generic webhooks — point them at Discord, Teams, Telegram, PagerDuty, Zapier, or your own endpoint
• External heartbeat — your site pings an outside monitor (Healthchecks.io, Cronitor, BetterStack, or any URL) on an interval you set, so you’re alerted even when the whole site is down. Health-aware mode signals failure when jobs break, not only when the server does.
• CSV export of the full run history
• Weekly summary email

Pro is $49 a year for a single site, $99 for 5, $199 for 25, and $349 for unlimited sites — with a 14-day trial that doesn’t ask for a card.

Privacy and requirements

• The free plugin sends nothing anywhere. It starts in anonymous mode — no signup prompt on activation, no data to Freemius unless you opt in.
• Pro contacts Freemius for license activation and updates, and sends the heartbeat ping only to the URL you enter. Both are described in Third-Party Services below.
• Requires WordPress 5.8+ and PHP 7.4+. Multisite supported. Translation-ready.
• Uninstall drops the log table and removes every option, transient, and scheduled event it created.

Third-Party Services

The free tier runs entirely on your server. The plugin connects to outside services only in the cases below.

1. Freemius (licensing, updates & opt-in). CronVitals uses Freemius, a third-party service, to handle Pro license activation, deliver Pro plugin updates, and process checkout. When you activate a Pro license or opt in, information such as your site URL, WordPress/PHP environment details, and (if you opt in) your admin email is sent to Freemius. Opt-in is optional and can be skipped; the free plugin functions without contacting Freemius until you choose to activate a license.

   • Service: https://freemius.com/
   • Terms of Service: https://freemius.com/terms/
   • Privacy Policy: https://freemius.com/privacy/

2. External heartbeat (Pro, opt-in, off by default). If you enable the heartbeat and provide a monitor URL, the plugin sends a periodic HTTP request to that URL so an outside service can alert you if your site stops responding. You choose the provider and the URL; no data beyond the ping (and, in health-aware mode, a success/fail signal) is sent. Common providers and their terms:

   • Healthchecks.io — https://healthchecks.io/ (terms: https://healthchecks.io/terms/, privacy: https://healthchecks.io/privacy/)
   • Cronitor — https://cronitor.io/ (terms: https://cronitor.io/terms, privacy: https://cronitor.io/privacy)
   • BetterStack — https://betterstack.com/ (terms: https://betterstack.com/terms, privacy: https://betterstack.com/privacy)