Crontinel

Summary

Crontinel is an open-source background job outcome monitor that separates process exit codes from business results. A job can exit 0 but process zero records; Crontinel marks this as failed and sends email alerts.

What is Crontinel?

Crontinel is an outcome monitoring system designed for background jobs. Traditional monitoring only checks if a process completed (exit 0) but cannot verify the work was actually done. Crontinel requires jobs to send an HTTP receipt containing business metrics like processed_records. When a scheduler stops, a worker crashes, or a job processes zero records, the system opens an incident and notifies the team. Supports curl, Node, Python, Sidekiq, GitHub Actions. The Laravel package automatically attaches queue depth and Horizon status.

Core Capabilities

• Dual-state tracking: Process status (completed/failed) and business outcome (passed/failed) recorded separately
• HTTP receipts: Any runtime sends the same JSON format with exit_code, processed_records, started_at
• Zero-record detection: Rules require minimum record count; actual zero marks as failed
• Scheduler monitoring: Detects missing cron entries even when the site responds 200
• Worker status: Per-worker queue depth, oldest job, failed job rate trends
• Offline alerts: Email notifications do not depend on the app model; still send after host crash
• Laravel deep integration: Composer package auto-collects snapshots from scheduler and Horizon

Pros

• Exit 0 no longer hides problems: Completion status separated from work result; zero throughput immediately visible
• Single receipt format: curl, Node, Python, Sidekiq, GitHub Actions use the same JSON body
• No second SDK needed: Direct POST to ingest endpoint; no language-specific client dependency
• Assistant-readable: Cursor, Claude Code can parse incident packets and understand zero records ≠ healthy
• Free to start: Single app free, no credit card required

Positioning & best fit

Crontinel is built for teams that rely on background jobs to process critical business logic: billing systems, report generation, data sync, notification delivery. When uptime monitoring shows all green but actual work silently stops, Crontinel fills that gap.

• SaaS platforms: Billing webhooks, invoice generation, dunning reminders need to ensure every run processes records
• Data engineering teams: ETL pipelines, analytics roll-ups require verifying row counts, not just exit codes
• Laravel applications: Teams using Horizon can auto-collect queue depth and supervisor status
• DevOps & SRE: Teams that need alerts even after the job host crashes