Bringschuld is German for "debt which must be delivered to the creditor". It's an analogy: your tasks have to deliver a check-in to our servers (the creditor).

We are a software company based in Vienna, Austria. We made Bringschuld for our clients and ourselves and decided it's too good not to share it.

Bringschuld monitors all types of recurring tasks - cronjobs for example - and alerts you if they fail. However, it doesn't bother you when they run on schedule.

You tell Bringschuld when your recurring tasks run by entering its cronrule or defining a custom interval. Let's say you set up a backup task to run every 24 hours and you expect it to finish within five hours. Whenever your backup task finishes you send a request to the Bringschuld servers notifying it that the task has completed successfully. We call this a check-in. If, for any reason, the backup fails to complete you will receive an alert email the minute the specified maximum run time has passed.

A task is what we call any form of email job, backup, queue worker, daemon, cronjob or loop running on your machines that you want to be alerted about if it fails.

There are two types of check-ins:
HTTP request: Each task you create has a unique URL that you must send a request to. For example your backup task could be scheduled like this:

Email: Each task has a unique email address associated with it. To check-in via mail you must send any mail to this email address. Attached files may not exceed 25 MB.
Detailed Setup Instructions

If you are responsible for a service that relies on emails for communication with its users you must verify that emails are finding their recipient. One of our clients - for example - has experienced a week long communication outage due to a problem with their email queuing process. To verify your emails are being received you should do the following: Schedule a task on Bringschuld that expects a check-in every day between 12:00 and 12:10. Schedule a task on your system to run at 12:00 every day that sends an email to the task's check-in email address. Should no email arrive between 12:00 and 12:10 Bringschuld will alert you about the failure.

You will be alerted if a task runs outside of its expected run time.

There is a checkbox in every task's settings that allows you to turn alerts for multiple check-ins in the same interval on or off.

Some intervals cannot be expressed through cron: e.g. running a task every 30 days. We fully support these kind of tasks: You can set up a task by specifying the next time it will start (e.g. 15-05-03 at 12:00 AM) and its recurring interval (e.g. every 30 days).

Yes you can. Cron rules are fully supported.

You can specify a maximum run time for both cron and interval tasks. To specify a minimum run time offset the start time of your task by the minimum run time. E.g.: tell Bringschuld that your task starts at 12:05 instead of 12:00 for a minimum run time of five minutes. This way you will be alerted about an unexpected check-in outside of an interval.

Any language which supports sending HTTP requests, thus also the command line.

You can set up a single task: either cron or interval.

One minute.

There is a maximum monthly threshold of mail and text message alerts. Its only purpose is to prevent misuse. We alert you well before you hit this threshold.
In the unlikely event that you need more alerts than we allow let's hash out a solution together: Let us know.
Additionally we stop sending alerts about missed intervals after 10 failing intervals in a row. We also do not send more than 10 alerts about unexpected check ins in an hour. For both of these situations we let you know that we stop sending alerts.

People use Bringschuld to stay in control of all kinds of recurring tasks:

• Monitoring cron jobs and alerting if they don't run as expected.
• Timing jobs or tasks and alerting if they finish too quickly or run too long.
• Monitoring heartbeats from queue workers, daemons, services, or any other application.
• Audit and Compliance: keep an offsite, immutable log of what jobs ran and when.

You can use credit card or PayPal for the monthly subscription. The payment is handled by Paddle. You can enter your VAT-ID during the checkout process. If you prefer bank transfer and/or yearly payment intervals please write us an email at payment@bringschuld.io.