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Practical guides on uptime, monitoring, and keeping your apps and APIs from failing silently.

• How to run a cron job every 5 minutes with crontab

  The crontab line for running a job every 5 minutes is */5 * * * *. Here is what each field means, the variants for 10/15/30 minutes, the three things that silently break a 5-minute job, and how to know it actually ran.

• How to Monitor a Cron Job (a Dead Man's Switch in 5 Minutes)

  Cron doesn't tell you when a job fails to run. Here's how to add a dead man's switch so you find out before your users do.