In a world of ephemeral containers and distributed systems, "everything fails all the time." Standard health checks tell you if a service is reachable, but they don't tell you if it's working.
Health Checks vs. Heartbeats
A health check is a pull: The load balancer asks "Are you okay?". A heartbeat is a push: The service screams "I just finished a critical task!".
Implementing the Watchdog
For tasks like:
- Weekly billing syncs
- Daily backup uploads
- Hourly cache invalidations
If these fail, a /health endpoint might still return 200 OK. By using CronRabbit as a Dead Man's Switch, you ensure that high-importance, low-frequency tasks are actually executing.