ModuleFest Cron Monitor help
Command line 1
FAQ & reference 14
- Do I need the hub to use Cron Monitor? No. Everything except the Support desk and optional telemetry works fully offline. The hub is only for tickets and, if you choose, usage stats.
- Do the WP-CLI commands work on managed hosts? Yes, wherever WP-CLI is available. They’re ideal for scripting health checks and profiling across many sites.
- Does profiling slow down my site? No. Instrumentation only attaches during actual cron dispatches, so normal front-end and admin page loads carry zero profiling overhead. During cron, each task adds one insert and one update — negligible next to the task itself.
- Does query profiling slow things down? It’s off by default. When on, it enables SAVEQUERIES during cron runs so it can record the query count and slowest query — useful while investigating a heavy task, but worth turning back off afterwards. Normal page loads are never…
- Glossary HookThe named action a scheduled task fires (e.g. woocommerce_scheduled_sales).ScheduleHow often a task recurs — hourly, twicedaily, daily, or a custom interval; “single” means it runs once.Stall thresholdHow long a task may run before Cron Monitor treats it as stuck and…
- How do I see which plugin owns a slow task? Open a run’s detail view (or the profiler) — Cron Monitor resolves the callbacks and shows the owning plugin or theme, so you know exactly where to look.
- How does Cron Monitor decide which tasks to guard? The Setup Wizard inspects your live cron queue and Cron Monitor’s own run history and pre-selects the tasks most at risk of harmful overlaps — anything that has already overlapped or stalled, tasks whose runtime is long or close to…
- I set up an external trigger. Should I still enable the loopback keepalive? It is optional. With a reliable external trigger you can leave the keepalive off. On mixed setups it does no harm — it is throttled and only fires when events are genuinely due.
- Is my data removed if I uninstall? Deactivating keeps your history and settings. Deleting the plugin runs the uninstaller, which drops the log table and removes all options and scheduled sweeps.
- My webhook test did nothing — what now? Confirm the URL is a valid incoming-webhook endpoint and that your host allows outbound HTTP requests. The email channel is a good fallback while you debug the webhook.
- What does usage telemetry send? Only anonymous, aggregate signals about which Cron Monitor screens/features are opened, plus a presence heartbeat, your site’s language/locale and a timestamp. No names, emails, user accounts, site URLs, page referrer, browser/user-agent, no persistent cookies or cross-session identifiers, and none of…
- What’s the difference between pausing and unscheduling? Unscheduling removes the event from the queue. Pausing keeps it scheduled but cancels its callbacks each time it fires, so nothing runs until you resume — handy for temporarily silencing a misbehaving job without losing its schedule.
- Why do I see a Running row that never finishes? A request may have ended (timeout or hard process kill) before the task closed. The sweep will mark it as stalled once it passes the stall threshold, then recover it.
- Will guarding a task make it run less often? Only when a previous run has not finished yet. In that case the overlapping copy is skipped and retried shortly after, so you never lose work — you just avoid running two at once.
Features 8
- Action Scheduler bridge When Action Scheduler is present (WooCommerce and friends), a dedicated page surfaces its queue — counts, recent and failed actions — and can trigger a run.
- Bottleneck profiler Every task that runs during cron is timed and measured, then ranked by average duration, peak memory and failure rate — so the resource hog is obvious. Profiling only runs during cron, so normal page loads are unaffected.
- Event editor Reschedule, change recurrence, add or remove events, and pause/resume a hook without losing its schedule. Define your own custom intervals too.
- Overlap protection For any “guarded” task, only one copy runs at a time. If a run is still going when the next is due, the overlap is cancelled and retried shortly after — preventing the pile-ups that deadlock databases.
- Per-run drill-down Each run links to a detail view: arguments, the callbacks that fired, the owning plugin/theme, memory, and — when enabled — DB query count and slowest query.
- Stall autopilot and alerts Fatal errors mid-task are captured; tasks past the stall threshold are force-closed and recurring ones re-scheduled. You’re alerted by email and/or webhook, rate-limited so you’re never flooded.
- Virtual system cron A secret REST endpoint lets a real crontab or uptime monitor drive cron on an exact schedule, with an optional loopback keepalive for sites that still get some traffic.
- WP-CLI Everything important is scriptable from the command line — ideal for agencies managing fleets of sites. See the WP-CLI commands topic.
Getting started 4
- How WP-Cron works, and why it misbehaves WordPress does not use your server’s real clock-based scheduler by default. Instead, on each page load it checks whether any scheduled task is due and, if so, fires it. That has two failure modes: – Low-traffic sites: if nobody visits,…
- Make cron reliable end to end – Open the Setup Wizard and go to the “Cron mode” step. – Add define( 'DISABLE_WP_CRON', true ); to wp-config.php. – Copy the crontab line shown and add it to your server’s crontab (or an external uptime monitor). – Click…
- Moving from Cron-Sentry ModuleFest Cron Monitor is the new name for Cron-Sentry. When you activate it on a site that had Cron-Sentry: – Your settings, guarded and paused tasks, custom schedules and run history are copied across. – Cron-Sentry is deactivated so the…
- Run status meanings – Success — the task started and finished normally. – Error — a fatal PHP error killed the task mid-run (captured by the shutdown guard). – Stalled — the task ran longer than the stall threshold and was force-closed by…
How-to guides 4
- Diagnose a slow or heavy task – Open the Dashboard and read the bottleneck profiler. The task with the longest bar (or highest memory) is your suspect. – Go to Scheduled Events and click “Run now” on that hook to reproduce it on demand. – Check…
- Edit, pause or add an event – Open Scheduled Events and click “Edit” on the event you want to change. – Re-time it, change its recurrence, or remove it — arguments are preserved automatically. – Use “Pause” to stop a hook from executing while keeping it…
- Monitor Action Scheduler – Open the “Action Scheduler” page to see pending, in-progress, failed, complete and canceled counts at a glance. – Filter to “failed” to find actions that need attention — a growing failed count usually means a job is erroring repeatedly.…
- Recover a stuck task – In Run History, filter by “Stalled” or “Error” to see what got stuck and why. – The sweep force-closes stalls and re-enqueues recurring events automatically — check Scheduled Events to confirm it is queued again. – If it keeps…
Support & privacy 2
- Anonymous telemetry On by default but fully anonymous: it sends only aggregate signals about which screens/features are used — never names, emails, accounts, site URLs, device data, or any cron data. It only transmits once the site is linked, and you can…
- Support desk Connect the site to your hub to raise and track tickets right inside wp-admin — each ticket carries an environment snapshot so issues can be triaged fast. – Set the hub URL and product key (built in, or via constants…
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