Monitor Scheduled GitHub Actions Workflows
GitHub silently disables scheduled workflows after 60 days of repository inactivity — a well-known surprise that causes nightly/weekly workflows to just stop running with no notification. A heartbeat ping as the final step catches that along with any other failure that stops the run before completion.
Setup
Create an incoming monitor
Add a heartbeat monitor in Pingtastic matching the workflow's cron schedule, with a grace period that accounts for GitHub Actions queue delays (schedule triggers can run several minutes late during high load).
Add a ping step at the end of the job
Steps run in order and stop on the first failure by default, so a ping step placed last only runs if every prior step succeeded.
on:
schedule:
- cron: '0 6 * * *'
jobs:
sync:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- run: ./scripts/nightly-sync.sh
- name: Report success to Pingtastic
run: curl -fsS https://ping.pingtastic.net/ping/nightly-syncGotchas
- ⚠GitHub automatically disables scheduled workflows in repositories with no commits for 60 days — this is the single most common cause of a "working" cron workflow silently stopping, and a missed-ping alert is often how teams find out.
- ⚠Scheduled workflow runs are not guaranteed to start exactly on time under GitHub's own load — give the grace period meaningful slack (15-30+ minutes) rather than matching the cron interval exactly.
Questions
Why would a scheduled GitHub Actions workflow just stop running?
The most common reason is GitHub's automatic disabling of scheduled workflows after 60 days with no commits to the repository's default branch — the workflow file is untouched, but it silently stops firing until someone re-enables it or pushes a commit.
Will the ping step run if an earlier step fails?
No, by default — GitHub Actions stops the job at the first failing step, so the ping step (placed last) never runs, which correctly results in a missed-check-in alert.
Related guides
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