Healthchecks

🌡️ Healthchecks

Monitor your backups with Healthchecks.io (opens in a new tab) integration.

Overview

Crestic integrates with Healthchecks.io to notify you when:

  • Pipelines complete successfully
  • Pipelines fail
  • Scheduled pipelines don't run (dead man's switch)

Healthchecks.io (opens in a new tab) is a cron monitoring service that alerts you when jobs fail or don't run on schedule.

Each pipeline can have its own check. Match the Healthchecks.io schedule to that pipeline's cron.

Setup

1. Create a Check per Pipeline

In Healthchecks dashboard:

  1. Click "Add Check"
  2. Set name (e.g., "Crestic documents pipeline")
  3. Configure schedule to match the pipeline cron expression
  4. Set grace time (how long to wait before alerting)
  5. Copy the ping URL

Example ping URL:

https://hc-ping.com/01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef

2. Configure Crestic

Add healthcheck_url on the pipeline:

pipelines:
  - name: documents-nightly
    cron: "0 2 * * *"
    healthcheck_url: https://hc-ping.com/01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef
    jobs:
      - type: backup
        name: local-backup
        # ... rest of config

With Slug

pipelines:
  - name: documents-nightly
    cron: "0 2 * * *"
    healthcheck_url: https://hc-ping.com/01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef/documents-nightly
    jobs:
      # ...

3. Enable Healthchecks

Pings are off by default. Pass --healthcheck to enable them:

# Healthcheck disabled by default
crestic backup --pipeline documents-nightly
 
# Enable healthcheck explicitly
crestic backup --pipeline documents-nightly --healthcheck
crestic backup --all --healthcheck
# Cron with healthchecks (typical crontab entry)
*/5 * * * * crestic cron --config /path/to/crestic.yaml --healthcheck

Notes:

  • --job runs do not send healthcheck pings (partial pipeline)
  • Dry-run does not send pings
  • Healthcheck ping failures are logged and do not fail the pipeline

Ping Payload

Bodies are plain text (not JSON).

Start (/start):

pipeline: documents-nightly
jobs:
  - local-backup
  - offsite-copy

Success: empty body

Fail (/fail): error message text

See Also

Hooks