Monitoring with Oh Dear

ohdear.app

• Health checks
• Monitoring scheduled tasks (cron jobs)
  • Syncing with Oh Dear

Health checks

See https://ohdear.app/docs/features/application-health-monitoring#laravel

Monitoring scheduled tasks (cron jobs)

Oh Dear can be configured to monitor scheduled tasks, giving alerts when a task fails to start or complete.

For Laravel projects, the spatie/laravel-schedule-monitor package can be used to automatically configure Oh Dear monitors for schedule tasks.

Follow the installation instructions at https://github.com/spatie/laravel-schedule-monitor, bearing in mind the following points:

• It is usually unnecessary to publish or amend the config file.

• The schedule-monitor:sync command should be added to the Forge deploy script, or the Composer deploy script if applicable:

  Forge

  $FORGE_PHP artisan schedule-monitor:sync

  Composer

  "scripts": {
      "deploy": [
          "...",
          "@php artisan schedule-monitor:sync"
      ]
  }

• A maximum of 5 scheduled tasks should be monitored per project to ensure we remain within our Oh Dear subscription limits. Use the ->doNotMonitorAtOhDear() helper to disable monitoring on Oh Dear for less important tasks. This will maintain the monitoring locally, just avoid pushing it to Oh Dear.

• For any tasks that typically take longer than 5 minutes, set a suitable grace period via the ->graceTimeInMinutes() helper.

• Tasks with a large number of arguments and options can cause false positives, especially if any of these are dynamic. Consider setting a monitor name via the ->monitorName() helper for any applicable tasks.

Syncing with Oh Dear

To sync with Oh Dear, credentials need to be provided:

• Create a new API token with access to the relevant site.
• Enable the 'Scheduled tasks' monitor in Oh Dear, and obtain the Monitor ID from the 'Settings' tab.

These should be configured as environment variables:

OH_DEAR_API_TOKEN=randomstring
OH_DEAR_MONITOR_ID=12345
OH_DEAR_SEND_STARTING_PING=true

Setting OH_DEAR_SEND_STARTING_PING=true will allow Oh Dear to show start times for each instance of a scheduled task, as well as finish times.