Tymo Blog

Writing on reliability

Cron job monitoring, scheduled task reliability, and the infrastructure decisions that let teams sleep through the night.

  1. Why cron jobs fail silently (and how to catch them)

    Cron jobs are invisible by design. When they work, you see the result. When they fail, you usually see nothing — until something is broken enough to notice. Here's why that happens and what to do about it.

  2. Dead man's switch monitoring explained

    Active monitoring checks whether something is running. Dead man's switch monitoring checks whether something ran — and finished. The distinction is subtle but it's the difference between catching failures and missing them entirely.

  3. Cron vs interval scheduling: which to use

    Tymo supports both cron expressions and fixed intervals for scheduling monitors. They seem interchangeable but have meaningfully different semantics. Here's how to choose.