JobTick

Rails job monitoring for Whenever, Solid Queue, and Sidekiq. Know when your scheduled jobs stop running — before your users do.

The problem

Your error monitor catches exceptions. Mission Control shows you failed jobs. Neither tells you when a recurring job simply stops running.

No exception. No alert. Nothing.

The Solid Queue scheduler process dies at 2am. Your nightly invoice job hasn't run in three days. Your users notice before you do.

JobTick solves this. It watches every scheduled job in your Rails app and alerts you the moment one goes silent — even when no error is raised.

Why JobTick over Healthchecks.io or Cronitor?

Those tools work — but they require you to manually add a heartbeat ping to every job. Touch 15 job files. Name each monitor by hand. Keep names in sync when jobs are renamed or removed.

JobTick reads your existing config files and registers everything automatically.

config/schedule.rb      → Whenever jobs, auto-discovered
config/recurring.yml    → Solid Queue recurring tasks, auto-discovered
sidekiq.yml             → Sidekiq periodic jobs, auto-discovered

Add the gem. Add your API key. Deploy. Done.

Installation

Add to your Gemfile:

gem 'jobtick'

Create an initializer:

# config/initializers/jobtick.rb
JobTick.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = ENV['JOBTICK_API_KEY']
end

That's it. On next deploy, JobTick reads your schedule config, registers a monitor for every job, and starts tracking.

No changes to individual job files. No manual monitor creation. No names to keep in sync.

Environments

JobTick is only active in production by default. In development, staging, or any other environment it silently does nothing — no pings are sent, no monitors are registered, no errors are raised. This means you can deploy the gem and configure it without worrying about local runs polluting your monitors or counting toward your plan.

If you want to enable JobTick in a non-production environment (e.g. to test your setup on staging before going live), opt in explicitly:

# config/initializers/jobtick.rb

# Enable on staging only
JobTick.configure do |config|
  config.api_key  = ENV['JOBTICK_API_KEY']
  config.enabled  = Rails.env.production? || Rails.env.staging?
end

# Enable everywhere — useful for a quick local smoke-test
JobTick.configure do |config|
  config.api_key  = ENV['JOBTICK_API_KEY']
  config.enabled  = true
end

# Drive it from an env var so you can toggle without a deploy
JobTick.configure do |config|
  config.api_key  = ENV['JOBTICK_API_KEY']
  config.enabled  = ENV['JOBTICK_ENABLED'] == 'true'
end

Removing stale monitors automatically

By default, monitors are only added — nothing is removed when you delete a job from your schedule. To have each deploy also clean up monitors that are no longer in your config, enable pruning:

JobTick.configure do |config|
  config.api_key = ENV['JOBTICK_API_KEY']
  config.prune   = true   # remove monitors absent from the latest sync
end

With prune enabled, a deploy acts as the single source of truth: any monitor whose key is not present in the current payload is permanently deleted. You can also remove individual monitors manually from the JobTick dashboard at any time.

What gets monitored

Solid Queue (`config/recurring.yml`)

# Your existing recurring.yml — no changes needed
nightly_report:
  class: NightlyReportJob
  schedule: every day at 3am

sync_exchange_rates:
  class: ExchangeRateJob
  schedule: every hour

At boot, JobTick reads this file and registers a monitor for each entry. It then installs an around_perform hook into ActiveJob::Base so every job execution automatically sends started, completed, and failed pings. No changes to your job files.

Sidekiq periodic jobs

Supports both sidekiq-cron and Sidekiq::Periodic:

# sidekiq-cron — loaded from config/sidekiq_cron.yml or in an initializer
Sidekiq::Cron::Job.create(name: 'Nightly Cleanup', cron: '0 2 * * *', class: 'NightlyCleanupWorker')

# Sidekiq::Periodic
Sidekiq.configure_server do |config|
  config.periodic do |mgr|
    mgr.register('0 * * * *', HourlyDigestWorker)
    mgr.register('0 2 * * *', NightlyCleanupWorker)
  end
end

JobTick installs a server middleware that wraps every job execution. For native Sidekiq workers (Sidekiq::Worker subclasses) pings are sent by the middleware. For Active Job workers dispatched through Sidekiq, pings are sent by the around_perform hook instead, so nothing is double-counted.

Whenever (`config/schedule.rb`)

Whenever schedules jobs as cron shell commands, so there is no Ruby hook point to instrument automatically. Add one line to config/schedule.rb:

JobTick::WheneverSetup.install!(self)

This overrides the built-in runner, rake, and command job types to wrap every execution with curl pings. Your existing schedule entries need no changes:

JobTick::WheneverSetup.install!(self)

every 1.day, at: '2:00 am' do
  runner 'InvoiceJob.perform_later'
end

every :hour do
  rake 'reports:sync'
end

After adding the line, run whenever --update-crontab as normal and all jobs will start sending heartbeats.

If jobtick is not already loaded via your Rails environment, require it first:

require 'jobtick/whenever_setup'
JobTick::WheneverSetup.install!(self)

What you get

Silent failure detection — alerts when a job stops running entirely, not just when it raises an exception. The failure mode your error monitor misses.

Auto-sync on deploy — add a job to your schedule, it appears in your dashboard at next deploy. Enable config.prune = true to automatically retire monitors when jobs are removed from your schedule.

Run history — see every execution: start time, duration, exit status. Spot when a job starts getting slower before it becomes a problem.

Maintenance windows — deploying at 3am? Snooze any monitor for a set period so you don't get paged for expected downtime.

Team alerts — email and Slack notifications. On-call rotation support on higher plans.

Requirements

Ruby >= 3.3
Rails >= 7.0
One or more of:

Adapter	Supported versions
Solid Queue	>= 0.1
Sidekiq	>= 6
sidekiq-cron	>= 1.0
Whenever	>= 0.10

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Built by Clearstack Labs