Crontinel

Crontinel is a monitoring tool for Laravel scheduling and queues, with the core goal of catching silent failures where "a process exits normally but does not actually complete its work." It emphasizes that "Finished is not the same as done," treating process status and business outcome separately to avoid misjudging task health based solely on HTTP 200 or exit code 0.

Purpose

Crontinel is used to monitor background tasks, cron schedules, queue workers, and agents. Typical scenarios include: a deployment overwriting cron entries causing the scheduler to stop, a worker process crashing while the queue manager still shows "running," or a task exiting with code 0 but processing 0 records. In these cases, traditional monitoring may show green, but the business has actually been interrupted. Crontinel receives HTTP receipts after task runs, compares them against business rules (such as a minimum record count), and triggers alerts when results do not meet expectations.

Main Capabilities

• HTTP receipt ingestion: Any runtime (curl, Node, Python, Sidekiq, GitHub Actions) can send the same JSON receipt to Crontinel, authenticated with an ingest key.
• Separation of process status and business outcome: When the process exit code is 0, the status remains completed, but the business outcome is determined by independent rules. For example, if a rule requires at least 1 record and processed_records in the receipt is 0, the check fails.
• Missing counts treated as failure: Omitting a count in a receipt is not treated as healthy; zero is a real result, and a missing count triggers a failure.
• Deep Laravel integration: Provides a Composer package that can attach receipts from the scheduler and report queue depth and Horizon freshness.
• Worker monitoring: Supports viewing status by worker type, pause detection, queue depth trends, failed job rates, and more.
• Alerts and recovery: Zero-work alerts and subsequent recovery are both sent by email. A later receipt that passes the rules closes the incident.
• Incident packet: Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex can read the same incident; the incident packet explains that completionis not the same as business success and will not mark the task as healthy.

How to Use

1. In any runtime, after a task completes, send an HTTP receipt to Crontinel using the ingest key (not the MCP key). Example: curl or Node sending the same JSON body.
2. For Laravel, install the Composer package, attach receipts from the scheduler, and optionally report queue depth and Horizon freshness.
3. Set business outcome rules, for example requiring processed_records to be at least 1.
4. When a receipt does not satisfy the rules, Crontinel sends an email alert; a later receipt that passes the rules resolves the incident.

Use Cases

• Scheduling task and queue monitoring for Laravel applications.
• Background tasks that need to distinguish "process completion" from "business completion."
• Unified receipt monitoring across multi-runtime environments (curl, Node, Python, Sidekiq, GitHub Actions).
• Teams that need to monitor worker status, queue depth, and failure rates.

Limitations

• The only publicly available alert channel is currently email; Slack and webhooks are not yet available on the public pages and require paid account support.
• Paid plans (Starter, Pro, Max) are in preparation, and the checkout flow and final terms of use are still under review.
• Free to start, no credit card required.
• Some language SDKs (such as npm, PyPI, gem) do not provide official packages; only sending JSON over HTTP is supported.
• Queue depth and Horizon freshness are shown only in Laravel and only when that snapshot has been reported.