Frequently asked questions

Your job sends a check-in on its expected schedule. If the check-in doesn’t arrive within the grace period, Pingvella flags the job as down and notifies you. It catches the failures that make no noise: a cron job that never started, a server that was switched off, a backup that quietly stopped.

Request your check’s unique URL when the job finishes, with curl, wget or any HTTP client. Append /start at the beginning of a run to measure its duration, or /fail to report a failure immediately.

A late check has passed its expected time but is still within its grace period. A down check has passed that window, or reported a failure. Alerts are sent when a check goes down, and again when it recovers.

Yes. Each check page shows ready-made Laravel scheduler code on the check’s own schedule, using pingBefore, thenPing and pingOnFailure, plus a heartbeat that tells you the scheduler itself is running.

Report it. Request your check’s /fail URL, or end the URL with the job’s exit status (/$? in a shell script), and Pingvella marks the check down straight away instead of waiting for the deadline to pass.

Yes. Anyone with the URL can send a check-in for that job, so treat it like a credential.

Yes. Add a website check with the address of your site or health page and Pingvella requests it every 5 minutes. A non-2xx response, a timeout or a connection or certificate error marks it down and sends your alerts, with a recovery notice when it is back. Every account can have five website checks. For sites that are not reachable from the internet, run the request from your own scheduler and check in only when it succeeds.

Every 5 minutes. If a request fails it is tried once more straight away, so a single dropped connection doesn’t raise a false alarm.

Anything other than a successful 2xx response once redirects are followed: an error page, a timeout, a refused or dropped connection, an expired or invalid SSL certificate, or an address that no longer resolves.

Not directly: Pingvella only requests public web addresses. For an internal site, run the request from your own server or scheduler and check in to Pingvella only when it succeeds. If the site stops answering, the check-ins stop and you are alerted.

Yes. Invite a teammate by email and choose whether they get view access (see the status, history and uptime) or admin access (also edit, pause and delete). You stay the owner and can change or remove anyone’s access at any time. Whoever you invite needs a Pingvella account, and they must accept before anything changes.

Yes. Transfer a check to another person and they become its owner once they accept. You choose whether you keep no access, view access or admin access afterwards. Alert destinations stay with you, so the new owner adds their own.

They can ask for edit access from the check page. The owner and admins are emailed, and any of them can approve the request, which makes that person an admin, or decline it.

Email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram or any custom webhook. You are alerted when a check goes down and again when it recovers, and the dashboard also raises an on-screen alert while you have it open.

Yes. The Starter plan is free: three cron or heartbeat checks, one type of alert destination, and five website checks. Paid plans add more checks and every type of destination.

Yes. Cancel from your plan page whenever you like, and your plan runs to the end of the period you paid for. After that your account moves to the free plan. If you have more checks than it allows, your oldest ones stay as they are and the rest are locked for 14 days: they keep collecting data but are hidden and send no alerts, so you can upgrade and unlock them. We email you when they lock, a week in, and the day before they are removed with their history.