Perimattic Managed Healthchecks - Cron Job Monitoring on AWS

This AMI runs Healthchecks, the open-source cron job and scheduled-task monitoring service, with PostgreSQL 17 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. The vendor's own image (healthchecks/healthchecks, published by the Healthchecks project) is pinned to v5.0.3, with PostgreSQL 17.11, and baked into the AMI, so first start does not depend on a registry. Healthchecks is an independent open-source project and Perimattic is not affiliated with it or with the hosted service healthchecks.io; product names are trademarks of their respective owners.

Why Healthchecks?

Your jobs ping a unique URL when they run. If a ping does not arrive on schedule, Healthchecks raises an alert. It supports simple periods and cron expressions, grace times, start and fail signals, pings from curl, email or HTTP, a public status badge and status pages, a management API, and notification integrations such as Slack, Telegram, webhooks and many others.

What Perimattic adds

Administrator created for you, sign-up closed: during first-login setup this AMI creates the one administrator (your email address and a random 24-character password generated on your server) and Healthchecks starts with REGISTRATION_OPEN=False, so nobody else can create an account. Setup then checks that the password works, that a wrong password is refused, that the sign-up page and its API answer 403 and that anonymous requests to the dashboard and the management API are refused. SECRET_KEY, the database password and the administrator password are generated per instance; there are no default or shared credentials in the image.

HTTPS: Apache is configured as a reverse proxy and a free Let's Encrypt certificate is requested for your domain with certbot. SITE_ROOT and ALLOWED_HOSTS are set to your domain. Healthchecks listens only on the loopback interface and PostgreSQL is reachable only inside the Docker network.

Patched base: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS built through an automated EC2 Image Builder pipeline, with security updates applied at build time.

What you should know

Email alerts need your own mail server. None is configured or shipped, so Healthchecks cannot send alert emails, and the email sign-in link is off (you sign in with your email address and password). Add your SMTP settings to the compose file to receive alerts by email (use port 587 or 465: Amazon EC2 blocks outbound port 25). Other channels such as Slack or Telegram are configured in the web interface with your own accounts and tokens.

The ping URLs (/ping/) are public by design, because your jobs call them without a login: anyone who knows a check's UUID can send it a ping, so treat the UUIDs as secrets. Badges and status pages you publish are readable by anyone with the link.

Healthchecks is light: about 325 MB of memory for the application and about 75 MB for PostgreSQL in our tests, so a t3.small (2 GB) is the recommended starting size.

Licence

Healthchecks is released under the BSD 3-Clause licence (copyright Peteris Caune and contributors); this AMI runs the unmodified upstream image, whose source is at github.com/healthchecks/healthchecks. PostgreSQL is released under the PostgreSQL License.

Getting Started Launch the AMI and open ports 22, 80 and 443 in the security group SSH in and answer the setup prompts (domain and admin email) Open https://your-domain  and sign in with your email address and the password printed at the end of setup Create checks and point your cron jobs at their ping URLs

A domain name with an A record pointing at the instance is required, because the site is served over HTTPS.

This AMI is built and supported by Perimattic.

Book a free setup consultation at https://cal.com/gaurav-pareek-perimattic/marketplace-setup-consultations  or email us at aws-support@perimattic.com .

Support Managed and supported by Perimattic, a cloud infrastructure company with 13+ years of experience serving global clients. We offer free setup assistance, custom integrations, infrastructure consulting, and 24/7 support.