Push monitors

Heartbeat monitoring for cron jobs, backups and batch pipelines — alert when something fails to check in.

Every other monitor type reaches out and checks something. A push monitor works the other way round: your job calls Glowo, and Glowo alerts you when the call does not arrive.

Use it for work that has no endpoint to poll — nightly backups, cron jobs, queue workers, ETL runs.

How it works

1. Create a push monitor. Glowo gives you a URL containing a secret token.
2. Your job requests that URL when it finishes successfully.
3. If no request arrives within the grace period, the monitor goes DOWN and your alerts fire.

The endpoint

POST https://api.glowo.dev/push/<your-token>

Returns 202 Accepted with {"ok": true}. Rate limited to 60 requests per minute per token.

Add it to the end of your job:

# Only runs if the backup succeeded — that is the point.
pg_dump mydb | gzip > ~/backups/mydb.sql.gz \
  && curl -fsS -m 10 -X POST https://api.glowo.dev/push/<your-token>

In a crontab:

15 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS -m 10 -X POST https://api.glowo.dev/push/<your-token>

Reporting a failure

A job that knows it failed can say so instead of going silent, which turns a grace-period wait into an immediate alert:

myjob || curl -fsS -X POST "https://api.glowo.dev/push/<token>?status=down&msg=backup+failed"

Unknown query parameters are ignored rather than rejected, so a tracking parameter appended by something in the middle will not break your heartbeat.

Grace period

The grace period is how long Glowo waits after the expected check-in before declaring the monitor DOWN.

Set it to your job’s normal runtime plus comfortable slack. A backup that usually takes 20 minutes and runs hourly wants a grace period well over 20 minutes, or a slow night will page you.

Retries without duplicate heartbeats

If your job retries the HTTP call, send an Idempotency-Key header so the retries collapse into a single heartbeat:

KEY=$(uuidgen)
curl -fsS --retry 3 -X POST \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: $KEY" \
  https://api.glowo.dev/push/<your-token>

The key must be printable ASCII, up to 200 characters. A malformed value is ignored rather than rejected — a bad header will never cost you a heartbeat.

Rotating the token

The push URL is a bearer secret: anyone holding it can report your job healthy. If it leaks, rotate it.

POST /monitors/<monitor-id>/regenerate-push-token

Choosing between push and HTTP

If the thing you want to watch has a URL you can call, use an HTTP monitor — it tells you the service is up right now. Use a push monitor when the only evidence that something worked is that it ran.