Sentry Crons
Cron job monitoring built into your error-tracking platform
What is Sentry Crons?
Sentry Crons is a scheduled job monitoring feature built directly into Sentry, the widely-used error tracking and application performance monitoring platform. It works on a check-in model: your jobs ping Sentry at the start and end of each run (via SDK, HTTP, or CLI), and Sentry compares those check-ins against the expected schedule, marking each execution as ok, failed, missed, or timed out. You get per-run visibility — when a job started, how long it ran, whether it succeeded — along with configurable margins for late or slow executions.
Where Sentry Crons genuinely excels is in the integration with the rest of the Sentry platform. A missed or failed cron run produces a Sentry Issue just like a code exception does, complete with stack traces, breadcrumbs, and assignable ownership to a team or individual. Teams already using Sentry for error tracking and tracing get cron health monitoring without adopting a separate tool, and failures surface alongside the application errors that may have caused them. Multi-environment support (e.g. staging vs. production sharing one monitor definition) and mute/pause controls add operational flexibility.
Best For
- Teams already using Sentry for error monitoring or APM who want cron visibility in the same platform
- Applications where cron failures are tightly coupled to code errors and benefit from shared stack traces and issue context
- Engineering teams that want to assign cron monitor ownership to specific teams or developers within an existing Sentry workflow
- Organizations that need per-execution run history, timeout detection, and missed-run alerting without adding another vendor
- Self-hosted or open-source-leaning teams comfortable with Sentry's self-hosted Docker deployment (source-available under Fair Source license)
Limitations
- Monitoring only — Sentry Crons does not execute or schedule your jobs; you must run jobs on your own infrastructure (cron daemon, task queue, cloud scheduler, etc.) and instrument them to send check-ins
- Requires adopting or already using the Sentry platform; the feature is not available as a standalone product, so teams without Sentry get the entire observability platform as a dependency
- Pricing scales per monitor beyond the single free monitor included: additional monitors cost approximately $0.78 each per billing cycle, and adding pay-as-you-go budget requires a paid Sentry plan
- No built-in HTTP job runner, uptime checks for external URLs, or public status pages — capabilities that purpose-built cron execution and monitoring tools provide
Sentry Crons vs CronJobPro
Sentry Crons and CronJobPro address overlapping but distinct problems. Sentry Crons is a monitoring layer you add on top of jobs you already run elsewhere — its strength is deep integration with error context, stack traces, and issue assignment inside a platform many teams already use for observability. CronJobPro, by contrast, both executes HTTP cron jobs on a schedule and monitors them (via heartbeat and dead-man's-switch), so teams that do not have existing scheduling infrastructure can run and monitor scheduled work in one place without an additional orchestration layer. CronJobPro also includes uptime checks and public status pages, which are outside Sentry Crons' scope. The practical choice often comes down to whether a team already lives in Sentry and wants cron health alongside their error feed, or whether they need a self-contained tool that handles both running and monitoring scheduled HTTP jobs.
Official Website
https://sentry.io/product/cron-monitoring/Frequently Asked Questions
What is Sentry Crons?
Sentry Crons is a scheduled job monitoring feature built directly into Sentry, the widely-used error tracking and application performance monitoring platform. It works on a check-in model: your jobs ping Sentry at the start and end of each run (via SDK, HTTP, or CLI), and Sentry compares those check-ins against the expected schedule, marking each execution as ok, failed, missed, or timed out. You get per-run visibility — when a job started, how long it ran, whether it succeeded — along with configurable margins for late or slow executions.
What is Sentry Crons best for?
Teams already using Sentry for error monitoring or APM who want cron visibility in the same platform. Applications where cron failures are tightly coupled to code errors and benefit from shared stack traces and issue context. Engineering teams that want to assign cron monitor ownership to specific teams or developers within an existing Sentry workflow. Organizations that need per-execution run history, timeout detection, and missed-run alerting without adding another vendor. Self-hosted or open-source-leaning teams comfortable with Sentry's self-hosted Docker deployment (source-available under Fair Source license).
How does Sentry Crons compare to an external cron service?
Sentry Crons and CronJobPro address overlapping but distinct problems. Sentry Crons is a monitoring layer you add on top of jobs you already run elsewhere — its strength is deep integration with error context, stack traces, and issue assignment inside a platform many teams already use for observability. CronJobPro, by contrast, both executes HTTP cron jobs on a schedule and monitors them (via heartbeat and dead-man's-switch), so teams that do not have existing scheduling infrastructure can run and monitor scheduled work in one place without an additional orchestration layer. CronJobPro also includes uptime checks and public status pages, which are outside Sentry Crons' scope. The practical choice often comes down to whether a team already lives in Sentry and wants cron health alongside their error feed, or whether they need a self-contained tool that handles both running and monitoring scheduled HTTP jobs.
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