Cronlight.Quartz.Dashboard 0.5.0

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Cronlight

A spotlight on your Quartz.NET jobs. Cronlight is a dashboard and API for Quartz.NET that you add to the ASP.NET Core app already running your scheduler: list, create, edit, pause, resume, run and delete jobs, and see what is running and what failed.

It uses the scheduler you already configured. It needs no connection string or schema of its own and never starts a second scheduler.

Website · Live demo · Documentation

Features

• Jobs: search, filter and page through thousands of jobs; create and edit them with cron, one-time and interval triggers; pause or resume a job, a group or every job; run one now, or once with different data; cancel a run.
• Job types: attributes give your IJob types a name, a form with typed and required parameters, and masked secrets, which can be kept out of the database as references to configuration.
• Execution history (optional package): every run with its outcome, error and what it logged, a running job's log so far, misfires and late starts, and run statistics: success rate and average and P95 duration, per job and over a period.
• Retries: failed runs retried automatically, as set per job type or per job.
• Alerts: Slack, Teams, webhook or email when a job fails, recovers or is stopped by Quartz.
• Export and import: jobs as JSON or YAML files, to move them between environments or keep them in source control; an import says what it will change before changing anything.
• Operations: an audit log of every change, OpenTelemetry metrics, a health check, and an OpenAPI description of the API.
• Several schedulers in one app, each with its own permissions.
• AI assistants (optional package): an MCP server, so Claude, Copilot or any MCP client can read jobs, runs and logs, and if you allow it pause, resume and run jobs, under the dashboard's permissions and audit log.
• AI mode (same package): ask about your jobs in plain language in the dashboard ("which jobs failed overnight, and why?"), answered by your app's own AI model with read-only tools, as the signed-in user.

Requirements

Until 1.0, a minor version (0.2, 0.3) may change options and endpoints, and its release notes say how; a patch version (0.1.1) does not.

Install

dotnet add package Cronlight.Quartz.Dashboard
dotnet add package Cronlight.Quartz.Dashboard.History   # optional: execution history
dotnet add package Cronlight.Quartz.Dashboard.Mcp       # optional: an MCP server for AI assistants, and AI mode

The setup below also calls AddQuartzHostedService(), from Quartz.Extensions.Hosting (or Quartz.AspNetCore). Cronlight does not install it, since your app owns its scheduler setup.

Quick start

// 1. Your existing Quartz setup stays exactly as it is
builder.Services.AddQuartz(q =>
{
    q.UsePersistentStore(s =>
    {
        s.UseProperties = true;
        s.UseSqlServer(builder.Configuration.GetConnectionString("Quartz")!);
        s.UseNewtonsoftJsonSerializer();
    });
});
builder.Services.AddQuartzHostedService();

// 2. Add Cronlight, and the optional features you want
builder.Services.AddCronlight(o =>
{
    o.ViewPolicy = "QuartzViewers";   // required outside Development
    o.ManagePolicy = "QuartzAdmins";  // create, edit, pause, run and delete
});
builder.Services.AddCronlightHistory();                                                   // execution history
builder.Services.AddCronlightAlerts(o => builder.Configuration.GetSection("CronlightAlerts").Bind(o)); // alerts
builder.Services.AddHealthChecks().AddCronlight();                                       // health check

var app = builder.Build();
app.UseAuthentication();
app.UseAuthorization();

// 3. Map it under any path
app.MapCronlight("/ops/jobs");

Open /ops/jobs/. The API is at /ops/jobs/api/*, described by an OpenAPI document at /ops/jobs/api/openapi.json.

• Access: without a ViewPolicy, the dashboard answers 403 outside the Development environment.

• Scripts: requests that change jobs must send an X-Cronlight-Request header (any value), which keeps other sites from using a viewer's cookies: curl -X POST -H "X-Cronlight-Request: 1" https://…/ops/jobs/api/jobs/DEFAULT/nightly/trigger

• Job types: any IJob in your app can be created from the dashboard. Attributes give one a proper form:

  [CronlightJob("Send invoices", Description = "Emails pending invoices for a customer")]
  [JobParameter("customerId", Type = JobParameterType.Int, Required = true)]
  [JobParameter("smtpPassword", Type = JobParameterType.Secret)]
  public class InvoiceJob : IJob { ... }
  

Limitations

• Quartz.NET 3.x only: Quartz 4 is not supported yet.
• The dashboard refreshes by polling (every 10 seconds by default) rather than live. A running job's log so far shows on the node running it; in a cluster, the other nodes show the log once the run has finished.
• Secret values are masked in the dashboard but stored in the Quartz tables as plain text, unless you use secret references.
• A run can be cancelled only from the node running it, and only if the job observes its cancellation token.
• Jobs of other apps sharing the scheduler (types this app cannot load) are read-only.
• Schedulers your app builds in code are read through Quartz's API unless you give Cronlight their properties: that suits hundreds of jobs rather than thousands, and their Running tab shows this node only.
• With the in-memory job store, or a database history does not support, history is kept in memory on each node and lost on restart.
• Alert failure streaks start again when the app restarts. Email alerts need STARTTLS or a plain connection, not implicit TLS on port 465.

Documentation

• Setup and options
• Job types and secrets
• Retries and re-running
• Execution history
• Failure alerts
• Exporting and importing jobs
• AI assistants (MCP server)
• AI mode
• Audit log
• Metrics and health checks
• Several schedulers in one app
• Scheduling API calls (HTTP job)
• Behaviour worth knowing
• Development and the roadmap

License

MIT. See LICENSE.