Monitor cronjobs in PHP

What is cronjob monitoring in PHP?

If you’re using a 3rd party API for cronjobs, or using Cronmon or something similar, monitoring cronjobs in PHP helps you ensure scheduled tasks run as expected.

For example, you might have a nightly backup or report generation.

Tracking their success and failures lets you respond quickly to issues.

Track cronjobs with Operational

Operational is an open-source platform for tracking events in your applications.

You can use it to log cronjob runs, failures, and performance metrics.

Operational Usage

Setting up Operational

Go to app.operational.co and sign up for a free account.
Create a new project for your PHP application.
Navigate to the project settings to find your API key.
Copy the API key and store it in a safe place or environment variable.

Code examples

<?php
$apiKey = 'API_KEY';
$payload = [
  'name' => 'cronjob_success',
  'avatar' => '✅',
  'content' => 'Daily report cronjob finished successfully in 85 seconds'
];

$ch = curl_init('https://api.operational.co/v1/events');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, [
  'Authorization: Bearer ' . $apiKey,
  'Content-Type: application/json'
]);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($payload));
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $result;
?>

This example logs a successful cronjob run.

<?php
$apiKey = 'API_KEY';
$payload = [
  'name' => 'cronjob_failure',
  'avatar' => '🚨',
  'content' => 'Backup cronjob failed with exit code 1'
];

// ... send HTTP request as above ...
?>

This example reports a cronjob failure.

<?php
$apiKey = 'API_KEY';
$payload = [
  'name' => 'cronjob_skipped',
  'avatar' => '⏭️',
  'content' => 'Cleanup cronjob skipped due to active lock file'
];

// ... send HTTP request as above ...
?>

This example tracks a skipped cronjob due to a lock.

Conclusion

Using Operational to monitor your PHP cronjobs can save you time and reduce headaches.

You get real-time visibility into job status, run times, and errors.

Learn more on the Operational website or try the playground to copy and paste snippets.