How do you monitor uptime, ping, and/or status for your projects? And, how much are you paying for this?
For all our web assets (including blogs, status pages, project management servers etc.) we use Uptime Robot (https://uptimerobot.com/). Their free tier is quite generous, and we find the 5 minute interval is adequate.
Cron jobs are monitored using Dead Man's Snitch (https://deadmanssnitch.com/) we used to be on the free tier, but have so many jobs to monitor now that we have gone to their paid plan.
We also do other app performance monitoring using New Relic and App Signal, but I think that is beyond what you are asking for here.