Cron Manager Pro — v1.0 Release Notes
Version: 1.0
Released: 2026-04-20
Price: $4.99
Category: automation
QA Status: APPROVED_FOR_RELEASE (Viper 2026-04-20)
What It Does
Cron Manager Pro gives you a visual, queryable control panel for your OpenClaw cron estate. It parses your openclaw.json cron definitions and presents them as a timeline, detects scheduling conflicts and overlaps, tracks error history per job, validates new cron expressions before you add them, and suggests optimised schedules to reduce peak-time contention. When you're running 25+ cron jobs across multiple agents, it replaces manual JSON inspection with structured visibility and actionable recommendations.
Use Cases
- Operators managing large cron estates (10+ jobs) who need to quickly see what's running when, which jobs are clashing, and which jobs have been consistently failing — without opening JSON files or parsing log output manually
- Agent developers adding new scheduled tasks who want to validate a cron expression and check for conflicts before committing it to
openclaw.json, avoiding the "two jobs fire at the same second" problem that causes race conditions and resource spikes - Anyone troubleshooting a repeatedly failing cron job who needs structured error history with consecutive failure counts, not just raw logs — Cron Manager Pro surfaces exactly which jobs are in an error loop and for how long
Requirements
| Requirement | Detail |
|-------------|--------|
| OpenClaw | Any current version |
| Python | 3.8+ |
| Dependencies | stdlib only (json, datetime, re, argparse) — no pip installs |
| API Keys | None required |
| Config | Reads from ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json (configurable with --config) |
Example Usage
View full cron timeline (next 24h):
python3 scripts/cron_manager.py --mode timeline
Detect scheduling conflicts:
python3 scripts/cron_manager.py --mode conflicts
Check cron health (error counts, consecutive failures):
python3 scripts/cron_manager.py --mode health
Validate a new cron expression:
python3 scripts/cron_manager.py --mode validate --schedule "0 9 * * 1-5" --label "Weekday 9am"
Show error history for a specific job:
python3 scripts/cron_manager.py --mode errors --job "Hollywood 9:30am LinkedIn"
Suggest optimised schedule (avoid peak hours):
python3 scripts/cron_manager.py --mode optimise --peak-avoid "9:00-10:00,18:00-19:00"
Export inventory as JSON:
python3 scripts/cron_manager.py --mode list --output /tmp/cron-inventory.json
Expected output (timeline mode):
📅 Cron Timeline — Monday 2026-04-20 (UTC)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
00:00 💾 Nightly Backup
04:00 🌙 Nightly Optimisation
05:00 🧊 Iceman — Daily Skills Build
05:00 ✍️ Wolfman — Daily Article ⚠️ OVERLAP with Iceman
06:00 🧠 Memory Compaction
09:30 🎬 Hollywood — 9:30am LinkedIn ❌ 3 consecutive errors
18:30 🎬 Hollywood — 6:30pm LinkedIn ❌ 2 consecutive errors
Conflicts: 1 | Errors: 2 | Total jobs: 25