Introducing Cronaut: one tool for uptime, cron and status pages
Why we built Cronaut, and how running three monitoring jobs on one check engine lets your status page keep itself up to date.
Most indie hackers end up running the same stack. UptimeRobot pings the site, Healthchecks.io watches the cron jobs, and Instatus hosts a public status page. That is three tools, three bills, and three dashboards. Worse, the status page sits there going stale because nobody remembers to update it when something actually breaks.
Cronaut replaces all three.
One engine, three check types
Every check in Cronaut runs through the same engine, whether it is an HTTP probe, a cron heartbeat or a TLS certificate. Each one carries a simple state:
UPmeans everything is healthy.DEGRADEDmeans something looks off but it is not down yet.DOWNmeans the check has failed past its grace period.
Since all three monitor types share that state, you configure them the same way and read them on one dashboard.
The status page keeps itself current
This is the part we care about most. In Cronaut, the one thing that happens is a monitor changing state. When a check goes from UP to DOWN, that change does three things on its own:
- It writes a durable entry to the transition log.
- It opens an incident on your public status page.
- It pushes a live update to anyone watching, over SSE.
When the check recovers, the incident closes the same way. You never open the status page to post an update, because the failure does it for you.
Built at an indie price
Cronaut is a small, focused tool, not a Datadog competitor. There is no APM, no log aggregation, and no metrics explorer you will never open. It does uptime, cron and status pages well, at a price that makes sense for a side project or a small SaaS.