Scheduler Watchdog — Free

Description

Every WooCommerce background job runs through Action Scheduler: marketing and CRM syncs, ERP and 3PL pushes, subscription renewals, review requests, email follow-ups, product imports. When one integration misbehaves it can enqueue hundreds of thousands of actions, or fire them in an ever-tightening loop. Your PHP workers are consumed, the database is hammered, and the storefront starts returning errors.

WooCommerce shows you a flat list of scheduled actions. It does not tell you which hook is responsible, how fast a backlog is growing, or that the queue runner has quietly stopped firing. You find out when checkout starts failing and customers tell you — or you never find out, and the orders simply are not there.

What Scheduler Watchdog does

Scheduler Watchdog sits beside Action Scheduler and watches the queue continuously. It samples queue depth and per-hook backlog, times every action and records failures through Action Scheduler’s own execution hooks, and puts the result on one screen: total pending and past-due counts, the hooks failing most often, the slowest hooks, the largest backlogs and the active alerts.

When a hook starts failing, goes past its due time with a growing backlog, or the queue runner stops firing, it emails your chosen recipients before customers notice. It also flags actions that are stuck in progress past the Action Scheduler timeout, and it can reclaim them so the queue keeps moving.

Old complete, failed and canceled actions are cleaned up under your retention rules, through Action Scheduler’s own cleaner, so nothing is deleted behind its back. Pending and in-progress work is never touched, there are hard minimum ages (7 days for complete and canceled actions, 30 days for failed), and a preview shows exactly what would be removed before anything happens. A longer retention setting is also applied to Action Scheduler’s own daily cleanup, so raising it genuinely keeps history that would otherwise be deleted at 31 or 90 days.

The plugin operates only on Action Scheduler’s own queue. It never reads or writes orders, order items, refunds or customer records.

What is included

Free — every capability, no licence key

• A queue health dashboard showing pending, past-due, in-progress and failed-in-window counts, plus the hooks with the highest failure rate, the slowest hooks and the largest backlogs.
• A WordPress dashboard widget for queue health at a glance.
• Email alerts for failed actions, stalled or past-due hooks, a missing or overdue queue runner, and stale in-progress claims.
• Per-alert cooldown so the same problem does not flood your inbox, and configurable recipients that default to the WordPress admin email.
• Configurable failure count and failure-rate thresholds, failure window, stall threshold, queue-depth threshold and the number of hooks shown per table.
• Safe, retention-based cleanup of old complete, failed and canceled actions, one click or on a daily schedule, with a dry-run preview and hard minimum ages.
• Stale-claim recovery for actions stuck in progress past the Action Scheduler timeout.
• An events log of alerts and cleanup actions, and opt-in debug logging.
• Works with Action Scheduler 3.9.x and 4.x, whether it ships inside WooCommerce or is installed standalone.
• Declared HPOS compatible. No outbound request of any kind until you choose to enter a licence key.

Nothing is locked, time-limited or held back. No licence key is required for any feature above.

How it works

1. Activate the plugin. It finds Action Scheduler automatically and starts sampling the queue on a one-minute schedule. Sensible defaults mean there is nothing to configure first.
2. Watch the dashboard. Pending, past-due, in-progress and failed counts, top failing hooks, slowest hooks and largest backlogs are on one screen, refreshed while you have it open.
3. Get alerted before customers do. When a hook fails, stalls or the runner disappears, the plugin emails your recipients once per problem and then respects the cooldown.
4. Clean up on your terms. Preview what would be removed, then delete old complete, failed and canceled actions by hand or on the daily retention run. Pending and in-progress actions are never included.
5. Add a licence when you want updates and support. Enter the key on the Licence tab; the plugin validates it against the store and enables dashboard updates. Monitoring keeps working with or without a key.

Requirements

• WordPress: 6.0 or higher.
• PHP: 7.4 or higher.
• Action Scheduler: 3.9.x or 4.x. This is the real dependency and it ships inside WooCommerce, so on a normal store it is already present. If it is absent the plugin stays inert, shows a notice and registers only its settings screen.
• WooCommerce: optional. With WooCommerce active the plugin adds its admin pages under WooCommerce and declares HPOS compatibility; without it, monitoring, alerting and cleanup still work and the menu falls back to Tools.
• HPOS: compatible. The plugin never touches order storage, so behaviour is identical with High-Performance Order Storage enabled or disabled.

Frequently asked questions

Does it work with HPOS?

Yes. Scheduler Watchdog declares compatibility with WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage and never reads or writes order data, so it behaves the same whether orders are stored in the posts tables or in HPOS. WooCommerce > Status > Compatibility lists it as compatible.

Does it require WooCommerce?

No. Action Scheduler is the real dependency. WooCommerce bundles Action Scheduler, so on a normal store it is already there. If you run Action Scheduler standalone, monitoring, alerting and cleanup all work; only the WooCommerce-specific HPOS declaration is skipped.

What happens when my licence expires?

The plugin keeps running on the version you have. You lose new updates and priority support until you renew, but monitoring, alerting and cleanup never stop. Renewing restores updates and support.

Does the free version stop working?

No. The free version is complete and has no time limit. There is no trial and no feature that switches off. The paid plans exist to fund a year of updates and priority support, not to unlock capability.

Can I use it on client sites?

Yes. A Pro key covers up to 3 site activations and an Agency key up to 25. You can move an activation by deactivating the plugin on one site from the Licence tab, which releases that slot, then activating it on another.

Do you offer refunds?

Yes. We refund within 14 days if the licence key was never activated. If the software is faulty, we refund it regardless of that condition. Email [email protected] from the address you purchased with.

Does it delete my jobs?

Never pending or in-progress work. Cleanup only removes old complete, failed and canceled actions, through Action Scheduler’s own cleaner. Hard minimum ages always apply: 7 days for complete and canceled actions, 30 days for failed actions, whatever the settings say. Cleanup is off until you enable it, and the preview shows what would be removed first.

Where is my data stored?

On your own server. Queue metrics and the events log live in two tables in your WordPress database, and the plugin stores only hook names, counts, durations and Action Scheduler action IDs. Nothing is sent anywhere until you enter a licence key. See the privacy note on this page for exactly what the licence server records and why.

Will it slow down my store?

No measurable impact on ordinary traffic. The hot path only writes to memory while an action runs and flushes one row per touched hook at the end of the request. Queue sampling is capped and cached, and the shutdown fallback sampler runs at most once a minute. On stores processing 500 or more orders a day, the metrics table is time-bucketed and pruned on a daily retention run, 14 days by default.