When cron fails silently
Scheduled jobs stop running and never say a word. How to actually know a job ran, and what to do when it didn't.
How do I know if my cron job actually ran?
"It ran" hides four different outcomes and only one is good. Why logs and error emails miss the worst case, and how a success heartbeat catches a job that never fired at all.
Why your Vercel cron job is not running
On Vercel it's rarely a mystery: the Hobby once-a-day cap, jobs that fire within the hour not on the minute, a CRON_SECRET that 401s your own cron, or a schedule that only runs in production.
Why your GitHub Actions scheduled workflow stopped running
GitHub auto-disables a scheduled workflow after 60 days of no repo activity — and the cron's own runs don't count as activity, so a quiet side project always trips it. Here's the rule, the fork gotcha, and the fix.
Why your Supabase pg_cron job isn't running
A pg_cron job that never runs is usually a missing pg_net extension, a UTC-not-local schedule, or a run that fired and failed. Here's how to read the run log Postgres keeps and find which is yours.
What a dead man's switch is (and when your app needs one)
Most monitoring watches for something bad happening. A dead man's switch watches for something good not happening — the right tool for backups and cron jobs that fail silently. What it is, and when you need one.