Monitoring cron jobs with Prometheus means the Pushgateway: your job pushes a completion metric, Prometheus scrapes it, and an Alertmanager rule fires when the metric goes stale. It works well and it assumes you already run all three.
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Is MonitoringDaddy a real Prometheus Pushgateway alternative?
For job monitoring without running Prometheus, Alertmanager and a Pushgateway, yes, with websites and certificates in the same account. Prometheus is the right answer if you already have that stack and want jobs alongside your existing metrics.
Pushgateway, Prometheus and Alertmanager, plus the rules, to learn that a backup stopped.
It holds metrics until told otherwise, which makes stale-job alerting more fiddly than it first appears.
Blackbox exporter exists, and is another component to run.
Green marks the stronger option on that row. Third-party pricing and limits change without notice — treat the Prometheus Pushgateway column as a starting point and confirm current figures on their site before you decide.
| Feature | Prometheus Pushgateway | MonitoringDaddy |
|---|---|---|
| Cron job monitoring | Yes — push a metric, alert on staleness | Yes — ping a URL, alert when it stops |
| Fits an existing metrics stack | Yes — perfectly | No |
| Cost | Free, open source | $5/mo for 25 of each monitor type |
| Components to run | Pushgateway, Prometheus, Alertmanager | None |
| Setup effort | Configuration and alert rules | Name a job, set a period, paste a URL |
| Website uptime monitoring | Via blackbox exporter — another component | Yes, on every plan |
| SSL and domain expiry | Via exporters | Yes — attached to any monitor, no extra allowance |
| Website change detection | No | Yes, with word-level diffs |
| Survives your own outage | No — it runs on your infrastructure | Yes |
| Hosted status page | No | Yes, included |
Every comparison page on the internet claims the author's product wins on everything. Here is where it does not.
If any of those are load-bearing for your team, staying put is the correct decision and this page has done its job. Monitoring you actually trust beats monitoring that is marginally cheaper.
Six monitor types and one dashboard. No add-on products, no separate SKUs for the features you assumed were included.
HTTP checks from external infrastructure, as often as every 60 seconds, with downtime and recovery alerts. See the uptime setup guide.
A dedicated monitor type with configurable advance warnings, so a certificate never lapses because nobody owned the renewal. See SSL expiry monitoring.
Registration expiry tracked as its own monitor, warning you months ahead. The outage nobody has a runbook for. See domain expiration monitoring.
Alert when a phrase appears or disappears on a page — defacement, stock changes, silent policy edits. See website change detection.
Watch a competitor or supplier price string and get told the moment it moves. See the price monitoring guide.
Public status pages included on every plan, hosted independently of your infrastructure so they stay up when you do not. See hosted status pages.
Alerts from any of these can be routed to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram, Flock or a generic webhook, and a single monitor can carry several channels at once. Everything is available through the REST API on paid plans, so monitors can be created and torn down programmatically rather than clicked through a form.
Flat monthly tiers. No per-seat charges, no credit top-ups, no usage meters — the number below is the whole bill.
| Plan | Monitors | Fastest interval | Alert channels | API | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | Every 30 minutes | — | $0 | |
| Founding Member first 20 only | 25 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $5/mo |
| Basic | 10 | Every 10 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $8/mo |
| Growth | 50 | Every 5 minutes | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $19/mo |
| Pro | 100 | Every 60 seconds | Email + webhook & chat | Yes | $34/mo |
Annual billing is cheaper on every paid tier. The pricing page is the authoritative list.
There is no automated importer — monitors are re-created by hand, or scripted through the API on paid plans. Budget about a minute per monitor.
List every active check: URL, interval, condition and alert recipients. Most teams find monitors nobody needs any more.
Start with revenue-critical URLs. Set the interval, add the condition, attach the channels your team already watches.
Keep Prometheus Pushgateway live while the new monitors settle. Compare alerts and confirm nothing is missing.
Move any public status page across, confirm a clean week of overlap, then cancel the old subscription.
This page is written by the team that builds MonitoringDaddy, so treat it as an informed argument rather than a neutral audit. What we can promise is that the claims about our own product are checked against what the software actually does, and the rows where Prometheus Pushgateway is stronger are marked as such rather than quietly omitted.
Details about Prometheus Pushgateway come from their public pricing and documentation at the time of writing. Monitoring vendors change plan limits and prices frequently and without announcement, so every third-party figure here carries a "verify on their site" caveat and you should take it seriously before making a decision on cost.
One thing worth stating plainly, because most comparison pages fudge it: MonitoringDaddy checks run from our own infrastructure, which is external to yours, but from a single origin rather than a global probe network. That is enough to catch outages and content changes independently of your stack. It is not enough to tell you a site is down in Frankfurt but up in Ohio. If regional verification is a hard requirement, a larger platform will serve you better and we would rather you knew that now.
Found something out of date or wrong? Tell us and we will correct it.
Every recorded change is compared word by word and kept with a before-and-after image. This is the real output, shown with worked example data.
Price fell from $49 to $39, and an annual discount was added.
The item is available again and the basket button returned.
A new subprocessor was added in another jurisdiction.
The free plan sends to one email address. Every paid plan adds the chat and webhook channels below, with 2 to 10 destinations depending on the plan. However many alerts you receive, the price does not change — nothing here is metered or charged per alert.
There are no voice calls and no SMS. If a phone call at 3am is a hard requirement, say so before you subscribe — we would rather tell you now than refund you later.
Usually the Pushgateway: the job pushes a completion timestamp, and an Alertmanager rule fires when that metric goes stale. Effective, and three components to run.
It retains pushed metrics until they are deleted, so "the job stopped" has to be expressed as staleness rather than absence. Workable, but a common source of confusion.
A ping URL, an expected period and a grace window. If the call does not arrive in time, you are alerted. Nothing to run.
Probably not for jobs alone. The argument is the website side — uptime, certificates, domains and page changes without adding exporters.
Not directly, but a webhook alert can reach anything that accepts one.
Yes — Prometheus for infrastructure metrics, this for external checks and jobs you would rather not instrument.
Last updated August 4, 2026 · Written by Amit Gupta, founder of MonitoringDaddy
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