Dead Man’s Snitch is a cron monitoring service built around a simple premise: if your job doesn’t check in, something is wrong. You add a curl call to your cron job, and if the ping doesn’t arrive within the expected interval, Dead Man’s Snitch sends you an alert.
For pure cron monitoring, it’s a clean, reliable tool. For Laravel apps with Horizon, it leaves most of the failure surface uncovered.
How Dead Man’s Snitch works
The setup is straightforward. You create a snitch, select an interval (hourly, daily, etc.), and add the ping URL to your cron job:
*/5 * * * * php artisan process:queue && curl https://nosnch.in/your-snitch-idIf the curl doesn’t fire within 1.5x the configured interval, Dead Man’s Snitch sends an alert to your configured channels.
It does exactly this. Nothing more.
What it doesn’t cover
Dead Man’s Snitch has no application awareness. It knows a cron job ran. It doesn’t know:
- Whether your Horizon workers are running
- Whether a supervisor is paused or has stopped
- How many jobs are in each queue right now
- Whether jobs are failing at an unusual rate
- How long the oldest job has been waiting
For a Laravel app that processes payments, sends notifications, or syncs external data, these signals matter more than the cron ping. A cron job can ping successfully and Horizon can still be paused, with queued jobs backed up and no alert fired.
The ping model and its limits
Any ping-based monitoring has a structural limitation: it can only tell you a job ran. It can’t tell you a job is stuck, a queue is overwhelmed, or a downstream dependency is failing.
Dead Man’s Snitch also requires you to add pings to every job you want monitored. New commands need new snitches. Teams maintaining many scheduled tasks end up with a growing list of snitches to configure, and any unconfigured command has no monitoring at all.
Crontinel hooks into Laravel’s scheduler events automatically. Every schedule:run invocation is recorded with its exit code and duration. No curl calls to add, no per-job configuration beyond the initial install.
Pricing
Dead Man’s Snitch charges per snitch. The free tier covers a single snitch. Paid plans start around $17/month for 20 snitches and go up from there.
Crontinel pricing:
- Free: 1 app, 5 monitors, 7 days of history
- Starter, Pro, and Max: planned paid terms under review
If you have 20+ scheduled tasks, compare each provider’s current limits before choosing a paid plan.
Feature comparison
| Capability | Crontinel | Dead Man’s Snitch |
|---|---|---|
| Horizon supervisor status | Yes | No |
| Horizon paused detection | Yes | No |
| Queue depth per queue | Yes | No |
| Oldest job age | Yes | No |
| Failed jobs per minute | Yes | No |
| Scheduled task run history | Yes | Yes (ping-based) |
| Dead-man ping monitoring | No | Yes |
| Automatic task recording | Yes | No |
| Slack alerts | Yes | Yes |
| Email alerts | Yes | Yes |
| PagerDuty | Yes | Yes |
| Webhook | Yes | Yes |
| Open source / self-hostable | Yes | No |
When Dead Man’s Snitch is the right choice
Dead Man’s Snitch is a good fit when:
- You run simple shell cron jobs outside of Laravel
- Dead-man alerting is your entire monitoring need
- You want the simplest possible setup with no package to install
- You’re monitoring a small number of tasks
When Crontinel fits better
Crontinel fits better when:
- You run Laravel Horizon in production
- You need queue-level visibility, not just cron pings
- You want monitoring that covers all scheduled tasks automatically
- You want Horizon and cron monitoring in a single tool
Installation
composer require crontinel/laravel
php artisan crontinel:installNo pings to add. No per-task configuration. All scheduled tasks are recorded from the first schedule:run, and Horizon monitoring activates automatically when Horizon is detected.