adelessert

WordPress’s built in cron system is clever, but notoriously unreliable. <a href="https://deadmanssnitch.com" rel="nofollow ugc">Dead Man’s Snitch</a> is a great service for monitoring any sort of scheduled task, and is a simple way to make sure that your WordPress cron jobs are working properly. If WP-Cron isn’t working properly, WordPress might not be updating itself regularly, scheduled posts may turn up late or not at all, and other features you count on might not work.
This plugin simply allows you to store your Snitch URL in the WordPress admin, and requests it once per hour. If Dead Man’s Snitch doesn’t hear from WordPress when it expects to, it’ll send you an email notification.

WP Dead Man’s Snitch

WordPress's built in cron system is clever, but notoriously unreliable.

Automattic

Mohammad Jangda

Erick Hitter

Thorsten Ott

This plugin allows you to take control over the execution of cron jobs. It’s mainly useful for sites that either don’t get enough comments to ensure a frequent execution of wp-cron or for sites where the execution of cron via regular methods can cause race conditions resulting in multiple execution of wp-cron at the same time. It can also help when you run into posts that missed their schedule.
This plugin implements a secret parameter and ensures that cron jobs are only executed when this parameter is existing.
<h3>Limitations</h3>
This plugin performs a <code>remove_action( 'sanitize_comment_cookies', 'wp_cron' );</code> call in order to disable the spawning of new cron processes via the regular WordPress method. If <code>wp_cron</code> is hooked in an other action or called directly this might cause trouble.

WP-Cron Control

This plugin allows you to take control over the execution of cron jobs.

WP Dead Man’s Snitch vs WP-Cron Control