Health checks — split between healthchecks.io (cron heartbeats) and Better Stack (HTTP uptime)

decision Sat Jun 20 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) monitoringhealth-checkheartbeatuptimecrondecisionsarchitecture

Health checks — cron heartbeats + HTTP uptime, split

Decision

Health-check coverage is split across two free tools, picked by what they verify:

Both are adopted as of 2026-06-20. They don't overlap: heartbeat verifies the runner ran, uptime verifies the URL responds. A silent cron failure produces no failed HTTP probe — only the heartbeat misses. A live URL responding 500s produces a heartbeat ping (the cron ran) — only the uptime probe fails.

Why both, not one

The user direction was: "BOTH — healthchecks.io + Better Stack heartbeats."

Different failure modes:

• A daily Wakatime ? JSONL cron silently failing at the API call step would never trigger a Better Stack alert (no URL), but healthchecks.io alerts the moment the next ping is missing.
• A Cloudflare Worker route at api.oriz.in/lifestream/git failing gives no heartbeat to monitor (Hookdeck retries don't ping healthchecks), but Better Stack's HTTP probe catches the endpoint going down.

Vendor-redundancy posture also helps: if Better Stack itself is the outage, healthchecks.io's heartbeat miss can post directly to Instatus as a manual incident — same fallback path documented in the two-status-page redundancy strategy.

Implications

• Every scheduled cron pings healthchecks.io. GitHub Actions schedule jobs and Cloudflare Cron Triggers per the cron split. Convention: curl -fsS --retry 3 $HC_URL as the LAST step of every cron workflow.
• Cron coverage table lives at services/monitoring/monitoring/healthchecks-io.md — each scheduled job (Wakatime daily, CF Analytics daily, restic backup, oriz-omnipost cron, Raindrop linkroll re-deploy, etc.) has its own check URL.
• Every public site + api.oriz.in is a Better Stack monitor. Apex-only per monitor-apex-only; subdomains inherit via Cloudflare cert auto-rotation.
• Quota math: ~10 GH Actions cron jobs + ~3 CF Cron Triggers = 13 of 20 free healthchecks slots = 35% headroom. ~12 active monitors envisioned (11 sites + api.oriz.in) at the 10-monitor Better Stack cap — apex-only keeps it at exactly 10. Per rules/never-hit-quotas, if Better Stack monitor count crosses 10 we add a second free account, not a paid plan.
• Auto-only posture — both tools verify auto-tracked surfaces without human polling, in line with auto-only-tracking. The alert routes (Slack / email) themselves are auto.
• Better Stack heartbeat-monitor mode is also on alongside the HTTP probes — the same Better Stack account already in use for uptime, status page, and Better Stack Logs (per the logs-better-stack-plus-cf-tail decision) — but healthchecks.io stays the primary for cron heartbeats (dedicated dead-man-switch UX, generous free tier, vendor split).

Cross-refs

• healthchecks.io service
• Better Stack service
• Monitoring services index
• Cron split decision
• Lifestream auto-event sources
• Logs — Better Stack + CF Tail — same Better Stack account
• Apex-only monitoring decision
• Auto-only-tracking rule (forward ref — being added in parallel)
• Never hit quotas rule