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What is Saturn?

Saturn is next-generation monitoring for scheduled jobs and cron tasks. Unlike traditional "ping or fail" monitors, Saturn combines health checking with statistical anomaly detection, giving you insights into when jobs run slower than normal, even if they technically succeed.

60-Second Overview​

Saturn monitors your scheduled jobs by listening for pings at expected intervals. When jobs miss their schedule, fail, or behave abnormally, Saturn creates incidents and sends alerts through your preferred channels (Email, Slack, Discord, Webhooks).

Why Saturn?​

Traditional Monitoring Problems​

❌ Binary thinking: Jobs either succeed or fail, no nuance
❌ No context: Duration spike from 10s to 5min? You'll miss it
❌ Alert fatigue: Too many false positives, or too many missed issues
❌ Manual setup: Complex configurations, vendor lock-in

Saturn Solutions​

✅ Anomaly detection: Automatic statistical analysis finds outliers
✅ Health scores: 0-100 grading with A-F ratings per monitor
✅ MTTR/MTBF tracking: Mean time to repair & between failures
✅ Zero-code Kubernetes: Helm chart + sidecar, done in 60 seconds
✅ WordPress native: Plugin for wp-cron monitoring at scale

Key Outcomes​

After setting up Saturn, you'll have:

  1. Visibility: Real-time dashboard showing all job health
  2. Early warnings: Catch performance degradation before failures
  3. Faster resolution: Incident timeline with full context
  4. Reliability metrics: Track uptime, MTTR, MTBF over time
  5. Peace of mind: Multi-channel alerts you can trust

Core Concepts​

Monitors​

A monitor represents a single scheduled job. It has:

  • A unique ping URL
  • An expected schedule (interval or cron expression)
  • Grace period settings
  • Statistical baseline (after ≥10 runs)

Pings​

Your jobs send pings to Saturn:

  • Start ping: Job begins execution
  • Success ping: Job completes successfully (includes duration)
  • Fail ping: Job fails (includes exit code and error output)

Incidents​

When something goes wrong, Saturn creates an incident:

  • MISSED: Job didn't ping when expected
  • LATE: Job pinged after grace period expired
  • FAIL: Job reported failure
  • ANOMALY: Job succeeded but duration/output anomalous

Alerts​

Incidents trigger alerts via:

  • Email (transactional, high deliverability)
  • Slack (rich Block Kit messages, threaded updates)
  • Discord (webhooks with embeds)
  • Webhooks (custom integrations with HMAC signatures)

Next Steps​

Choose your path based on your environment:

First-time users

We recommend starting with the Choose Your Path guide to find the quickest setup for your use case.