AWS Scheduled Task Monitoring

AWS has at least four ways to schedule recurring work — EventBridge Scheduler, ECS scheduled tasks, Lambda timer triggers, and EC2 crontabs. All four can ping crond.io after success.

EC2 crontabs (traditional)

The simplest case: a Linux crontab on an EC2 instance. Wrap with crond-agent for full reporting:

# Install once (single static binary)

curl -sSL crond.io/install | sh

# crontab -e

0 2 * * * crond-agent wrap --name "nightly-backup" -- /usr/bin/backup.sh

ECS scheduled tasks

For containerized workloads on ECS (Fargate or EC2 launch type), include crond-agent in your image and use it as the container command:

# Dockerfile

FROM your-base-image

RUN curl -sSL crond.io/install | sh

CMD ["crond-agent", "wrap", "--name", "etl", "--", "/app/etl.py"]

Pass CROND_PING_KEYvia the task definition's environment block, or pull it from Secrets Manager / Parameter Store. The agent will pick it up automatically.

EventBridge Scheduler (no container)

If your EventBridge rule has an HTTP target (e.g., calling your own webhook endpoint), add a final ping URL as a chained step via Step Functions, or have the target service ping crond.io itself at the end of its work.

If the rule triggers a Lambda, the Lambda should ping at the end of its handler:

# Python Lambda — after main work completes

import urllib.request, os

def handler(event, context):

# your work here

urllib.request.urlopen(f"https://api.crond.io/ping/{os.environ['CROND_KEY']}", timeout=5)

Pings are fire-and-forget — a 5-second timeout is plenty. If the ping itself fails, the Lambda still succeeds; the next missed run is what eventually fires the alert.

IAM and VPC considerations

crond.io ingest lives at api.crond.io(HTTPS, public). Your AWS workloads need outbound 443 access. If you're running in a private subnet:

NAT gateway + IGW route works out of the box
VPC endpoint (PrivateLink) is not currently supported — public egress required
Security groups need outbound 443 on 0.0.0.0/0 (or our static IPs — contact us for the allowlist)

Use cases by AWS service

RDS snapshot lifecycle: Lambda triggered nightly, pings on success
S3 lifecycle audits: ECS scheduled task running a Python report
Certificate Manager renewal monitoring: EC2 crontab on a small instance
EventBridge → SQS consumer: consumer pings after draining the batch

$get-started --free $cli reference