You'll begin by telling CronAlarm about your jobs. This includes optionally telling CronAlarm how often the job should run and how long it should take to execute. You will then be given an API key specific for your job. To begin monitoring your jobs, you simply wrap your code with a beginning and end API call. For the Simple API it looks like this for a job with an API key of 12345:
With just these 2 lines of code, we'll be able to tell when and how long your job ran.
The Advanced API is, well, more advanced. But it's still super easy, and provides some nice features that help when issues arise. You start off by doing a simple GET request just like the Simple API. You follow with a POST request that can send additonal information:
Getting an error report that tells you that your file transfer job failed is nice, but getting an error report that tells you that your file transfer job on server 'webserver1' located at '/var/www/ftptransfer.js' is pretty cool and much more helpful. If you manage jobs that run on multiple servers you'll really appreciate this additional information.
Keep in mind we are using curl just as an example. You may be using another language such as Java, Perl, Node.js, etc. that have built-in tools for accessing URLs. But if curl is your thing, it's all right with us.