Hey r/Wordpress,

A couple of weeks ago I shared SlimPress here, and the feedback from this community was awesome. Today I’m back with another tool I built out of my own day-to-day frustration: Cron Monitor.

Every time a scheduled post missed its publish window, a backup silently failed, or a site slowed down because of background tasks, I ran into the same wall. Existing cron plugins are great at showing you what is scheduled to run, but unless you pay for a Pro tier or an external SaaS, you're mostly flying blind on what actually happened when the job executed.

I wanted full execution visibility without paywalls, so I built it myself. Just like my last plugin, it is 100% free. There is no pro tier, no locked features, no nag banners, and zero telemetry.

What it covers

• Execution History & Timing: See exactly when jobs ran, how long they took, and any recorded errors—including fatal crashes and timeouts.
• Instant Failure Alerts: Get notified via Email, Slack, or Discord when a background job crashes, runs late, or stops running altogether.
• Plugin & Theme Ownership: Automatically maps cryptic cron hooks back to the specific plugin or theme that owns them by inspecting their observed callbacks.
• Orphan & Duplicate Cleanup: Identifies duplicate events and leftover cron jobs from long-deleted plugins based on what actually happens when they run, with a safe preview before you remove anything.
• Full Job Management: Add, edit, run on-demand, pause, resume, or bulk-delete events and custom schedules straight from the admin.
• Cron Health & WooCommerce Support: Tracks cron jobs that are progressively getting slower, flags server config issues blocking wp-cron.php, and automatically logs failed Action Scheduler tasks (huge for debugging WooCommerce).
• Developer Tools: Includes native WP-CLI commands, CSV exports, and a REST API for connecting your own external monitoring tools.

How it behaves on your site

• Zero bloat or phoning home: All logs stay strictly inside your local WordPress database. The only outbound requests are the optional failure alerts if you explicitly configure an email address or Slack/Discord webhook.
• Works out of the box: Once activated, just head to Tools → Cron Monitor. Duplicate detection, ownership mapping, and health checks work immediately, and your execution history starts building as your background jobs run.
  

Quick transparency note on AI: All the core logic and architecture were written by hand - AI was only used to help with UI mockups, class scaffolding/boilerplate, testing, documentation, and a final code review pass.

👉 Cron Monitor on WordPress.org

I’d love to get some feedback from others maintaining WordPress sites—especially if there are specific edge cases, WP-CLI flags, or webhook payloads that would make debugging background tasks easier for your workflow!