Tickstem
Heartbeat monitoring for AI agent pipelines
The dead man's switch pattern for autonomous AI workflows. Know when your agent stopped doing useful work — even when the server is healthy and the HTTP response is 200.
Read →Blog
Engineering notes and product updates from the team.
Monitoring AI agents in production
AI agents fail in ways traditional monitoring doesn't catch. How to monitor autonomous agent workflows with uptime checks, heartbeat monitoring, and execution history.
Read →Scheduling recurring tasks in AI agent workflows
AI agents need cron jobs too. How to add reliable scheduled task execution to autonomous agent workflows — HTTP scheduling, MCP integration, and exactly-once execution.
Read →How to detect and block temporary email addresses at signup
Temp mail passes every syntax check and often passes MX validation. Here's how to reliably detect disposable addresses using blocklists, MX record analysis, and a verification API — and why maintaining your own list doesn't scale.
Read →Add production monitoring to Claude Code apps in minutes
Tickstem's MCP server lets Claude Code register cron jobs, set up heartbeat monitoring, and verify emails without leaving the editor — here's the full walkthrough.
Read →Vercel cron alternative: what to use when built-in cron isn't enough
Vercel's built-in cron has no failure alerts, no execution history on Hobby, and no heartbeat monitoring. Here are the best alternatives depending on what you actually need.
Read →Healthchecks.io alternatives for developers (2026)
Healthchecks.io is solid for heartbeat monitoring but covers only one use case. Here are the best alternatives if you also need cron scheduling or uptime monitoring — with an honest comparison table.
Read →How to detect and block Mailinator emails (and 4,000+ disposable domains)
Mailinator gives anyone a working inbox at any @mailinator.com address with no signup. Here is how it bypasses your signup form, why blocklists alone are not enough, and how to detect it reliably with MX lookups and verification APIs.
The status page that updates itself
Most status pages lie because they need a human to update them. Here's how to fix that by generating your status page directly from your monitors.
Read →Your Python cron jobs are failing silently. Here's how to fix it.
Cron jobs fail in two ways: loud failures you catch immediately, and silent failures where the job just stops running. Here's how to catch both using the Tickstem Python SDK on Vercel, Railway, Render, and Fly.io.
Read →Heartbeat monitoring: know when your jobs stop running
Uptime monitoring tells you when your server goes down. Heartbeat monitoring tells you when your scheduled jobs quietly stop doing anything useful — a different failure mode that a health endpoint can't catch.
Read more →Cron jobs and uptime monitoring belong together
When a scheduled job fails, the first question is always the same: is the scheduler broken, or is the endpoint down? Here's why having both in the same place changes how you debug incidents.
Read more →Why email validation is harder than a regex
The pattern /.+@.+\..+/ accepts disposable inboxes, defunct domains, and role-based addresses. Here's what actually needs to happen before you trust an email.
Why cron jobs fail on serverless — and how to fix it
You deploy to Vercel, everything works great, then you add a simple recurring task. Twenty minutes later you're debugging why it ran three times, or didn't run at all. Here's what's actually happening.
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