Check in from a cron job

Use this guide to make a machine check in automatically, so that an alarm fires if the machine — or the alerting path the script exercises — stops working.

You will need a timer UUID of your own; install the phone app to create one.

Add the check-in to a script cron runs

Add one line to the end of a shell script that tests out your alert system, run from a cron job:

curl https://triplepat.com/api/v1/checkin/YOUR-TIMER-UUID

Putting it at the end matters: if anything earlier in the script fails, the check-in never happens, and your timer goes stale.

Configure the alert interval

In the app, configure the timer to alert when it has been too long since the last check-in. Choose an interval comfortably longer than the cron schedule — for a job that runs every 10 minutes, an alert threshold of 30 minutes tolerates a transient missed run without alerting you for nothing.

That’s it: one line of shell and one setting.