Should I create one heartbeat per task or one for the whole scheduler?

Start with one heartbeat for your most critical scheduled task. Add per-task heartbeats only for high-impact jobs that you can’t afford to miss.

Can heartbeat monitoring catch stuck workers or queue backlog?

It can catch the symptom (tasks running late or not completing). For root cause, you’ll still use your logs and metrics—but heartbeat gives you the early warning.

What’s the simplest way to add a heartbeat ping from Python?

Make an HTTP request to the UpDog check-in URL after success (for example, using requests). Keep it short and fail-safe so it doesn’t break your task.

Monitor Celery Beat (and background jobs)

Q: How do I monitor Celery Beat scheduled tasks?

Use UpDog heartbeat monitoring. Ping a UpDog check-in URL from the scheduled task (or from a wrapper) after it completes successfully. UpDog alerts if check-ins stop or run late.

Q: How do I reduce false alarms for Celery Beat monitoring?

Set realistic intervals, add a grace window, and only alert on lateness that matters. Separate prod and staging monitors to avoid noise.

If Celery Beat stops scheduling tasks, you often won’t know until data is wrong or customers complain. UpDog heartbeat monitoring gives you a clean signal: the task checked in on time (or it didn’t).

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Celery Beat monitoring using UpDog heartbeat checks

What you can do with UpDog + Celery

Celery’s failure modes are sneaky: Beat is running but not scheduling, the broker is unhealthy, workers are stuck, tasks are timing out, or a deploy broke imports. Heartbeat monitoring doesn’t replace logs—it replaces guessing.

Alert when scheduled tasks stop running (missed check-ins).
Alert when tasks are running late (backlog, slow dependencies).
Route alerts to the right channel (email by default; on-call/SMS for critical tasks).

How to set it up (step-by-step)

Create a heartbeat monitor in UpDog for a specific task (recommended) or for a “scheduler is alive” ping.
Copy the check-in URL.
Add the ping after successful completion of the task. (If the task fails, don’t ping.)
Set an expected interval and a grace window that matches real execution time.
Send a test run and confirm the check-in is visible in UpDog.

Example: ping UpDog after a successful task

# inside your Celery task
import requests

def run_task():
    # ... do work ...
    requests.get("https://updog.watch/heartbeat/your-check-in-url", timeout=5)

Use a short timeout. If you don’t want external calls in tasks, ping from a wrapper job after success.

Best practices

Monitor the outcome, not the intent

Ping UpDog after the task completes successfully. That turns “task was scheduled” into “task finished.”

Pick a small set of critical tasks

Not every periodic task deserves a page. Start with the tasks that impact payments, user-visible data, or core business operations.

Split by environment

Keep staging/dev heartbeats out of production routes. You want clean signal, not constant background noise.

Troubleshooting

Missed check-ins after deploy: confirm the ping code still runs and the check-in URL is unchanged.
Everything is late: check broker health, worker concurrency, and dependency latency.
Intermittent misses: check outbound network/DNS from the worker environment and timeouts.
Alerts are too frequent: increase the grace window or alert only when lateness exceeds your tolerance.

FAQ

How do I monitor Celery Beat scheduled tasks?

Add a heartbeat ping after successful task completion and alert when check-ins are late or missing.

One heartbeat per task or one for the scheduler?

Start with one per critical task. Scheduler-level heartbeats are a nice extra, but task-level heartbeats catch silent failures better.

Can heartbeat monitoring catch stuck workers or backlog?

It catches the symptom: tasks run late or stop completing. Use logs/metrics for the root cause.

How do I reduce false alarms for Celery Beat monitoring?

Use realistic schedules, add a grace window, and page only for meaningful delays.

Simplest way to add a heartbeat ping from Python?

Make a short-timeout HTTP request to the UpDog check-in URL after success.

Related features

Related use cases

Kubernetes CronJob monitoring – K8s scheduled job monitoring
Laravel Scheduler monitoring – PHP scheduled task monitoring
Heartbeat monitoring – General cron job and worker monitoring
All use cases

Catch silent background job failures

Heartbeat checks are the simplest “is the job actually running?” signal.

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