Cron Checker
The Cron Checker tool diagnoses the health of Magento cron. It reports overall cron health, per-group heartbeat, detects failing, stuck, and never-scheduled jobs, and returns a bounded run history with error messages. It is read-only.
Access control
Access to this tool is controlled by the MCP Tools -> Built in -> System -> Cron Checker ACL resource. Enable or disable it in System -> Permissions -> User Roles -> [Role] -> Role Resources.
When to use
The AI assistant uses this tool to answer questions such as "is cron running?", "why didn't job X run?", or "show the recent errors for job Y".
Parameters
| Parameter | Description | Type | Required |
|---|---|---|---|
action | What to return: status for an overall health summary, or jobs for per-job details. | string | Yes |
module | Filter results to a single module, e.g. Magento_Indexer. | string | No |
job_code | jobs only. A substring match against job codes. When provided, returns the run history for the matching job(s). | string | No |
status | jobs summaries only. Filter by last run state: success, error, or running. | string | No |
limit | Maximum number of rows to return. Job summaries default to 20 (max 100); run histories default to 10 (max 50). | integer | No |
Output
The status action returns an overall health summary:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
cron_alive | Whether cron has run recently enough to be considered alive |
last_success | Timestamp of the most recent successful cron run |
| pending count | Number of pending schedule rows |
| per-group last-success age | How long ago each cron group last succeeded |
problems | List of detected issues, classified as failing, stuck, not_running, or never_scheduled |
Magento prunes cron schedule history, so very old runs may no longer be visible. The summary also reports a "not checkable" count for jobs that cannot be evaluated from the available history.
To investigate a specific job after a problem is reported, call the tool again with action=jobs and the relevant job_code to retrieve its run history and error messages. See the Indexer tool for cases where a stalled reindex is actually waiting on cron.