◷ Cron expression explainer
The cron expression 0 0 1 1,4,7,10 * means: at 00:00, on the 1st of the month, in January, April, July and October. In UTC its next runs are Fri 2027-01-01 00:00 and Thu 2027-04-01 00:00. A heartbeat monitor with a 60-minute grace period, pinged at the end of each run, alerts you when the job stops running or fails silently.
Paste a 5-field cron expression. Get what it means in plain English, when it runs next, and what could go wrong. Nothing is sent anywhere; it runs on our server in a few milliseconds.
| minute | hour | day of month | month | day of week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 0 | 1 | 1,4,7,10 | * |
| 0 | 0 | 1 | 1, 4, 7, 10 | 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 |
Next 10 runs · UTC
- Fri 2027-01-01 00:00 UTC (+00:00) · in 80d 3h
- Thu 2027-04-01 00:00 UTC (+00:00) · in 170d 3h
- Thu 2027-07-01 00:00 UTC (+00:00) · in 261d 3h
- Fri 2027-10-01 00:00 UTC (+00:00) · in 353d 3h
- Sat 2028-01-01 00:00 UTC (+00:00) · in 445d 3h
- Sat 2028-04-01 00:00 UTC (+00:00) · in 536d 3h
- Sat 2028-07-01 00:00 UTC (+00:00) · in 627d 3h
- Sun 2028-10-01 00:00 UTC (+00:00) · in 719d 3h
- Mon 2029-01-01 00:00 UTC (+00:00) · in 811d 3h
- Sun 2029-04-01 00:00 UTC (+00:00) · in 901d 3h
Times are UTC, which is what most cloud servers and GitHub Actions use. Set a timezone above to see local times.
Watch out
✓ No gotchas specific to this expression.
Monitor this job
cron never tells you when a job stops running. Add a heartbeat ping after the command: Vigil expects it on this schedule and alerts you if it doesn't arrive within the grace period (we'd suggest 60 minutes here).
0 0 1 1,4,7,10 * /usr/local/bin/my-job.sh && curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 -o /dev/null https://puzaricloud.in/ping/<your-token>
0 0 1 1,4,7,10 * curl -fsS -m 10 -o /dev/null https://puzaricloud.in/ping/<your-token>/start; /usr/local/bin/my-job.sh; curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 -o /dev/null https://puzaricloud.in/ping/<your-token>/$?
Replace /usr/local/bin/my-job.sh with your command and <your-token> with the token Vigil gives you. && means the ping only goes out when the job succeeded.
Know the moment a cron job doesn't run
Paste the same expression into a Vigil heartbeat. Vigil works out when each run is due in your timezone, waits the grace period, then alerts you if the ping never came, if the job reported a failure, or if it started and never finished.