Docs › Railway cron schedule monitoring with RunVouch
Railway cron schedule monitoring with RunVouch
Railway cron schedule monitoring for the run that did not happen: a Railway service with a cron schedule starts, runs its start command and exits. The dashboard shows it happened; nothing tells you when it stops happening.
How it runs on Railway cron schedules
The service's start command. Railway expects the process to exit when done; rv run exits with the wrapped command's code.
Store the key
Service Variables: RUNVOUCH_KEY. Shared variables work across services.
Wrap the job
# Railway start command rv run nightly-report --log /tmp/report.log -- python report.py
rv fails open: if RunVouch is unreachable the job still runs and you get one warning line.
Register the cadence and caps
rv agent nightly-report --cadence 24h --grace 30m --max-runtime 1h --evidence --cap-run-cost 2
Register the agent once, from anywhere with the key. Cadence is what turns a schedule that stopped into an alert; --evidence makes a run without evidence a failure; the caps pause the agent when it overspends.
What goes silent on Railway cron schedules
- Railway documents that a cron run is skipped if the previous execution is still running; that is a MISSED in RunVouch terms and a STALLED for the one still going.
- Deploy failures stop the schedule with the service; MISSED covers both.
What Railway cron schedules does not tell you
Railway's cron documentation states that a scheduled execution is skipped when the previous one is still running, and that the process must exit on its own. Both cases are visible only in the deployment logs. There is no notification for a skipped execution, a crashed start command, or a schedule removed from the service settings.
What RunVouch detects
| Alert | What it means here |
|---|---|
| MISSED | cadence plus grace passed and no run started |
| FAILED | non-zero exit or a reported failure, with the stderr excerpt |
| NO_EVIDENCE | the run said ok but the file, URL or assertion you required is missing |
| STALLED | a run started and never ended within max runtime |
| RETRY_STORM | the same tool called with identical input many times in one run |
| BUDGET_RUN / BUDGET_DAY | cost cap crossed; the agent is paused until you resume it |
| DRIFT | duration or output size far off its 7-run baseline |
Set up in two minutes
- Get a free key (3 agents, no card) and store it where this page says.
- wrap the job: copy the snippet above into the scheduled job.
- Register the cadence once:
rv agent nightly-report --cadence 24h --grace 30m --evidence, or let the first run create the agent and set the cadence on the dashboard. - Send one test alert:
curl -X POST https://api.runvouch.com/v1/settings/test-alert -H "X-API-Key: $RUNVOUCH_KEY". The next missed, failed or empty run reaches the same channels.
Also running platforms?
Fly.io scheduled Machines. Cron inside Docker (supercronic, crond). Render Cron Jobs. The full list of runtimes is on integrations, and the same agent can report from several of them: one job, one cadence, wherever it happens to run.
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