CronPeek vs Grafana OnCall: Dedicated Cron Monitoring vs General Incident Management

Grafana OnCall and CronPeek solve fundamentally different problems. Grafana OnCall is an open-source incident management platform—it routes alerts, manages on-call schedules, and handles escalation policies. CronPeek is a purpose-built dead man's switch for cron jobs. If you've been searching for a way to monitor cron jobs within the Grafana ecosystem, here's an honest breakdown of how these tools compare and when each one makes sense.

Different Tools for Different Problems

The search query "Grafana OnCall cron monitoring" reveals a common pain point: teams running the Grafana stack want to monitor their cron jobs, and they assume OnCall can do it. The reality is more nuanced.

Grafana OnCall is the response layer. It takes alerts that already exist—from Prometheus, Grafana Alerting, Alertmanager, or third-party tools—and routes them to the right person at the right time. It manages who gets paged, when they get paged, and what happens if they don't respond. It does not generate alerts on its own.

CronPeek is the detection layer for cron jobs specifically. It watches for pings from your scheduled tasks and fires an alert when a ping doesn't arrive on time. It generates the alert. It doesn't manage on-call schedules or escalation policies—it tells you something went wrong.

These tools operate at different layers of the monitoring stack, which means comparing them head-to-head isn't entirely fair. But if your goal is "make sure my cron jobs are running," the path to that goal looks very different with each tool.

What Grafana OnCall Does

Grafana OnCall is an open-source incident response and on-call management platform, now part of the Grafana LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir). It was originally built by Amixr and acquired by Grafana Labs in 2021. Its core features include:

• Alert routing — Receive alerts from Prometheus, Grafana Alerting, Alertmanager, Datadog, Zabbix, and dozens of other sources. Route them based on labels, severity, and custom rules.
• On-call scheduling — Create rotation schedules, define who's on call when, manage shift swaps, and set up follow-the-sun coverage across time zones.
• Escalation policies — Define chains: if the primary on-call doesn't acknowledge in 5 minutes, page the secondary. After 15 minutes, page the engineering manager. Fully configurable.
• Multi-channel notifications — Slack, PagerDuty, email, phone calls, SMS, Telegram, Microsoft Teams, and custom webhooks.
• ChatOps integration — Manage incidents directly from Slack. Acknowledge, resolve, and escalate without leaving your chat tool.
• Grafana integration — Native integration with Grafana Cloud and self-hosted Grafana instances. Alerts from Grafana Alerting flow directly into OnCall.

Grafana OnCall's strengths

OnCall excels at the human coordination side of incident management. When an alert fires at 3 AM, OnCall makes sure the right person is paged, tracks acknowledgment, and escalates if nobody responds. For teams already running Grafana, Prometheus, and Alertmanager, OnCall is the natural choice for incident routing.

The open-source model is a genuine advantage. You can self-host OnCall with full functionality, contribute to the codebase, and avoid vendor lock-in. Grafana Cloud also offers a managed version with a generous free tier.

The cron monitoring gap

Here's the catch: Grafana OnCall doesn't monitor anything. It routes alerts that other tools generate. To monitor cron jobs with OnCall, you need to build the detection layer yourself:

1. Write a Prometheus exporter or custom script that tracks when your cron jobs last ran
2. Define alerting rules in Prometheus or Grafana Alerting that fire when a job misses its schedule
3. Configure OnCall to receive and route those alerts
4. Maintain the entire pipeline as your cron jobs change

This works. Many teams do it. But it's hours or days of setup for something CronPeek handles in 30 seconds.

What CronPeek Does

CronPeek is a purpose-built dead man's switch for cron jobs and scheduled tasks. The entire product is designed around one workflow:

1. Create a monitor with a name, expected interval, and grace period
2. Add a curl to the end of your cron job that pings CronPeek's API
3. If the ping doesn't arrive within the interval plus grace period, CronPeek alerts you

No Prometheus. No alerting rules. No exporters. No infrastructure to manage. One API call to create a monitor, one curl in your crontab, and you're done.

# Create a monitor
curl -X POST https://cronpeek.web.app/api/v1/monitors \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"name": "Nightly Backup", "interval": 86400, "grace": 900}'

# Add to your crontab
0 2 * * * /scripts/backup.sh && curl -fsS --retry 3 https://cronpeek.web.app/api/v1/ping/MON_ID

CronPeek's advantage is obvious: it eliminates the entire detection pipeline that you'd have to build and maintain with Grafana OnCall. For teams that just need to know "did my scheduled task run?", CronPeek provides that answer without requiring the Grafana observability stack.

Head-to-Head Comparison

Here's a direct comparison of both tools when evaluated for cron job monitoring, as of March 2026:

When to Choose Grafana OnCall

Grafana OnCall is the right choice when you need a comprehensive incident management platform. Specifically:

• You're already running the Grafana stack — Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Alertmanager are part of your infrastructure. OnCall is the natural extension for alert routing and on-call management.
• You need full incident management — on-call rotations, escalation chains, acknowledgment tracking, and ChatOps incident management are requirements, not nice-to-haves.
• You have a large DevOps or SRE team — multiple engineers sharing on-call duties, follow-the-sun schedules, and complex routing rules justify the setup overhead.
• Cron monitoring is one of many alert sources — you're already routing Prometheus alerts, Grafana alerts, and third-party alerts through OnCall. Adding cron job alerts to the same pipeline makes sense even if it requires custom configuration.
• You prefer self-hosted solutions — OnCall's open-source model means you control your data, your infrastructure, and your uptime. No vendor dependency for incident routing.
• Budget for engineering time, not SaaS — your team has the bandwidth to build and maintain custom Prometheus exporters and alerting rules. The engineering investment is worth it for full control.

If your team is already invested in the Grafana ecosystem and cron monitoring is just one piece of a broader observability strategy, building the detection layer within your existing stack is a reasonable approach.

When to Choose CronPeek

CronPeek is the right choice when you need dedicated cron monitoring without the overhead of a full observability stack:

• You're monitoring cron jobs specifically — no on-call scheduling, no escalation policies, no multi-source alert routing. Just "did my scheduled task run?"
• You're a small team or solo developer — you don't have an SRE team to build and maintain custom Prometheus exporters. You need cron monitoring that works in 30 seconds.
• You want instant setup — one API call to create a monitor, one curl in your crontab. No Grafana instance, no Prometheus, no alerting rules to write.
• You're budget-conscious — $9/month for 50 cron monitors is cheaper than the engineering time to build equivalent functionality in the Grafana stack, even if OnCall itself is free.
• You don't run Grafana — not every team uses the Grafana stack. If you're on AWS CloudWatch, Datadog, or no monitoring platform at all, CronPeek adds cron monitoring without forcing a new infrastructure dependency.
• You want zero maintenance — CronPeek is a managed service. No servers to patch, no Prometheus rules to update, no exporters to debug when they break.

Can You Use Both? Yes—And You Should

The best approach for teams already running Grafana OnCall is to use both tools together. They complement each other perfectly because they operate at different layers:

• CronPeek handles the detection layer: monitoring your cron jobs and detecting when they fail or miss their window.
• Grafana OnCall handles the response layer: routing CronPeek's alerts to the right on-call engineer, managing escalation, and tracking incident resolution.

The integration is straightforward. Configure CronPeek to send webhook alerts to Grafana OnCall's incoming webhook endpoint. When a cron job misses its ping, CronPeek fires the webhook, OnCall receives it, and your existing on-call rotation, escalation policies, and Slack notifications kick in automatically.

# CronPeek webhook payload sent to Grafana OnCall:
{
  "alert_group": "cronpeek",
  "title": "MISSED: Nightly DB Backup",
  "message": "Monitor 'Nightly DB Backup' missed its expected ping. Last seen: 2026-03-28T02:00:00Z. Expected interval: 24h. Grace period: 15m expired.",
  "monitor_id": "mon_x7k9m2",
  "status": "down",
  "severity": "critical"
}

# OnCall routes this based on your existing escalation policies:
# 1. Notify #ops-alerts in Slack
# 2. Page primary on-call via PagerDuty
# 3. Escalate to secondary after 5 minutes

This approach gives you the best of both worlds: purpose-built cron detection without building custom Prometheus exporters, and enterprise-grade incident routing through OnCall. The combined cost is $9/month for CronPeek plus whatever you're already paying for Grafana Cloud (or zero for self-hosted).

The DIY Alternative: Building Cron Monitoring in Grafana

For completeness, here's what it takes to build cron job monitoring natively in the Grafana stack without CronPeek:

Step 1: Create a Prometheus exporter

# Custom exporter that tracks last cron execution time
# (Python example using prometheus_client)

from prometheus_client import Gauge, start_http_server
import time, os

cron_last_run = Gauge(
    'cron_job_last_run_timestamp',
    'Timestamp of last successful cron execution',
    ['job_name']
)

# Your cron job updates this file on each run
def check_cron_status():
    for job in ['nightly_backup', 'report_gen', 'cleanup']:
        stamp_file = f'/var/run/cron_stamps/{job}'
        if os.path.exists(stamp_file):
            cron_last_run.labels(job_name=job).set(
                os.path.getmtime(stamp_file)
            )

start_http_server(9090)
while True:
    check_cron_status()
    time.sleep(30)

Step 2: Write alerting rules

# prometheus_rules.yml
groups:
  - name: cron_monitoring
    rules:
      - alert: CronJobMissed
        expr: time() - cron_job_last_run_timestamp > 90000
        for: 15m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: "Cron job {{ $labels.job_name }} missed"
          description: "Job hasn't run in over 25 hours"

Step 3: Configure OnCall routing

Set up an integration in OnCall to receive alerts from Alertmanager, define routing rules based on the severity label, and assign escalation chains.

This approach works and gives you full control. The trade-off is clear: hours of setup and ongoing maintenance versus 30 seconds with CronPeek. For teams with dedicated SRE staff, the DIY approach makes sense. For everyone else, CronPeek eliminates the busywork.

Pricing Comparison

The pricing comparison between these tools requires looking beyond sticker prices.

Grafana OnCall pricing

• Self-hosted: Free (open-source). But you pay for infrastructure—servers, databases, maintenance time. A minimal deployment needs a VM, PostgreSQL, Redis, and a message broker.
• Grafana Cloud Free: OnCall included, limited to basic features and a small number of users.
• Grafana Cloud Pro: Starting at $29/month for advanced features, higher limits, and priority support.
• Hidden cost: The engineering time to build Prometheus exporters, alerting rules, and maintain the cron monitoring pipeline. For a small team, this could be 4-8 hours of initial setup plus ongoing maintenance.

CronPeek pricing

The real cost comparison isn't $9/month vs. free. It's $9/month vs. the engineering hours to build and maintain custom cron monitoring within the Grafana stack. If your engineering time costs $100/hour, even 2 hours of setup makes CronPeek cheaper for the first 22 months—and that's before accounting for ongoing maintenance.

The Honest Take

Grafana OnCall and CronPeek aren't really competitors. They serve different functions in the monitoring stack.

Grafana OnCall's real competition is PagerDuty, OpsGenie, and incident.io—incident management platforms that handle alert routing, on-call scheduling, and escalation. OnCall is the open-source alternative in that category, and it's genuinely good at what it does.

CronPeek's real competition is Cronitor, Healthchecks.io, and Dead Man's Snitch—tools that specialize in cron job monitoring. CronPeek competes on price and API simplicity in that category.

If you need both cron monitoring and incident management, the best approach is to use both: CronPeek for detection, Grafana OnCall for response. You get purpose-built tools at each layer without the overhead of building custom monitoring pipelines.

If you only need to know whether your cron jobs are running, CronPeek is the shortest path to that answer. No Grafana, no Prometheus, no alerting rules. Just a dead man's switch that works in 30 seconds.