CRX Cron Health Monitor

Your cron did not fail. It never ran. WP-Cron only fires when someone visits your site. That is why nightly backups silently wait until morning, why DISABLE_WP_CRON without a real cron kills every scheduled task without a word, and why a single fatal error can jam the whole queue while every dashboard stays green.

Cronitorex shows you what is actually happening on your site, and tells you exactly who is responsible.

See your cron for the first time

• Cron Health Score (0-100) with named deductions: every lost point is a concrete problem with a concrete fix, never an opaque number
• Task attribution: every cron hook mapped to the plugin or theme that registered it, with its version. An alert says “WooCommerce 9.x”, not a cryptic hook name
• Real execution data: how long each task took, how late it ran versus its schedule, peak memory, and fatals or timeouts caught mid-task
• A task table that answers questions: what runs here, who owns it, when it runs next, how its last run went

Ten detections that name the problem

1. WP-Cron disabled with nothing triggering it (the most common silent death in WordPress)
2. Night-time cron gaps: your site sleeps, so your nightly jobs do too
3. Tasks running long after their scheduled time
4. Overdue events piling up in the queue
5. Tasks dying mid-run from fatal errors or PHP timeouts
6. Orphaned events left behind by removed plugins
7. Duplicated events doing the same work twice
8. Tasks slow enough to hurt real visitors
9. Emails failing to send (wp_mail failures are silent by default)
10. Mail going through PHP mail() without SMTP, the classic road to the spam folder

Each detection appears in the dashboard with a suggested fix, and in the native Site Health screen (Tools – Site Health), where WordPress admins already look.

The dead man’s switch

Everything above runs locally and needs no account. But a tool that lives inside WordPress has a blind spot it cannot escape: when WP-Cron dies, the tool dies with it. A dead scheduler looks exactly like a healthy one from the inside.

Connecting a free Cronitorex account closes that gap. The plugin sends a heartbeat every five minutes; when your cron stops, the heartbeat stops, and the silence itself raises an alert from outside within minutes. Nothing that runs inside your site can do this.

Per-task monitors (paid plans)

On paid plans, every recurring cron task gets its own monitor with its own history and alerts:

• Monitors are created for you, within your plan limit, with alert windows derived from how the task actually behaves (95th percentile of observed runs), not from guesses
• Every run reports start, completion or failure, with duration
• A task that disappears from the schedule gets its monitor paused, never deleted: destroying history stays a human decision

For developers

• WP-CLI: wp cronitorex status, wp cronitorex doctor, wp cronitorex sync
• No external libraries, no JavaScript frameworks, no build step
• Instrumentation never touches other plugins’ code and never slows a request: all reporting is non-blocking, and every failure of the monitoring itself is swallowed by design

Privacy

The plugin sends nothing anywhere until you connect an account. Once connected, telemetry is aggregate numbers and task names only: run counts, durations, lag. No task arguments, no post content, no emails, no personal data. Ever.

External Services

This plugin can connect to the Cronitorex monitoring service (cronitorex.com). Nothing is sent anywhere until you enter your API keys on the Configuration tab; without keys the plugin is fully local.

Once connected, it talks to two endpoints:

• https://api.cronitorex.com – receives monitoring pings: the site heartbeat (aggregate counters: number of runs, failures, worst duration and delay) and, on paid plans with per-task monitors enabled, one ping per task run (task hook name, status, duration). Sent from your server whenever monitored tasks run.
• https://app.cronitorex.com/api/v1 – the management API, called only from explicit admin or WP-CLI actions (creating the heartbeat monitor, syncing per-task monitors, reading your plan limits).

Data sent never includes task arguments, post content, emails or personal data.

Service provided by Cronitorex: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy.