The moment it happens

Get alerted when a Heroku dyno crashes

When any dyno of your app enters a crashed state, you get one email about it.

Runs: The moment it happens
Apps: Heroku
AI: Not needed
Access: read

Send this to your assistant

Create a ClickRuntime automation: email me when any dyno of my Heroku app 'shop-api-prod' crashes, with the dyno name and time. Only send one email per crash.

Paste it into your assistant. It tells you what it will send or change before it runs live.

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First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.

Why use it

Why teams use this automation

A crashed dyno on Heroku is usually restarted automatically, so the failure hides itself. The app comes back, a few requests return 503 errors and nobody notices until the pattern repeats: a memory leak that restarts a worker every 40 minutes, an unhandled exception in a web process, a boot loop after a bad config change. By the time customers complain, the app has been unstable for hours or days.

When a dyno crash event arrives (or the dyno list shows state crashed), the team is notified with the app and dyno name. The notification is sent once per incident, so a repeated crash loop does not produce a flood of messages.

It suits teams without a full monitoring stack, and anyone who wants a direct signal about dynos separate from application-level error tracking.

What you get out of it

Crash loops are caught early
A dyno crashing every few minutes is serious but invisible from the outside. A message ensures someone looks at the logs before customers feel the effect. That moves the discovery from a customer complaint to a Slack message.
Memory leaks show up as a pattern
Repeated notices about the same dyno at regular intervals point at a leak. That tells engineers where to look, without a month of guessing. Matching crash times to traffic or scheduled jobs tells engineers where to start.
Config mistakes are found quickly
A boot crash right after a config change points straight at the change. The alert arrives while the change is still fresh in everyone's mind. Rolling back a bad setting immediately takes a minute, and finding it a day later takes hours.
No flood during an incident
One notice per incident keeps the channel readable while the team works the problem. Constant pings during an outage only add stress. A readable channel also lets people coordinate on a fix instead of muting notifications.
Fills a gap beside error trackers
Error trackers catch exceptions, but not always the process itself dying. A dyno-level alert covers failures that never produce a neat stack trace. That makes it a useful second layer on top of whatever error tracking you already use.

How it works

What happens, step by step

When a dyno in your Heroku app changes, Heroku tells ClickRuntime straight away. A five-minute check is available as a fallback.
ClickRuntime ignores everything except dynos that have crashed.
You get one email per crash with the dyno, the app and the time, rather than a repeat on every check.

Before it runs live

Connect Heroku
Paste your automation's link into the other app's webhook settings

What you get

RunsThe moment it happens

Get alerted when a Heroku dyno crashesjust nowSucceeded

Email · Dyno crashedDyno web.2 crashed on shop-api-prod Time: 2026-10-19T03:42:11Z

Build your own

Need it to work differently?

This template is a starting point. Copy the prompt and change it, or describe a different automation from scratch, with your own conditions, more apps or an AI step. Your assistant writes it, tests it and runs it on ClickRuntime.

Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.

Changes you can ask for

Act only on the items that match your own rules, and skip the rest
Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
Combine it with other Heroku steps into one automation

Under the hood

The code that runs this automation

This is the Python script that runs each time the automation starts. Your AI assistant writes it for you when you send the prompt, and you allow each step in your assistant. To change how the automation works, describe the change to your assistant and it updates the script for you. For every function it can use, see the script reference.

get_alerted_when_a_dyno_crashes.pyexample

from clickruntime import on_event, notify, state

@on_event
def handle(event):
    body = event.json
    dyno = body.get("data", {})
    if body.get("resource") != "dyno" or dyno.get("state") != "crashed" or dyno.get("app", {}).get("name") != "shop-api-prod":
        return {"skipped": True}
    key = f"{dyno['name']}@{dyno['updated_at']}"
    if state.get("last_crash") == key:
        return {"duplicate": True}
    notify.email_me(f"Dyno {dyno['name']} crashed on shop-api-prod", f"Dyno: {dyno['name']}\nTime: {dyno['updated_at']}")
    state.set("last_crash", key)
    return {"alerted": key}

FAQ

Common questions

What counts as a crash?

A dyno whose state is crashed, meaning the process exited unexpectedly or failed to boot. Planned restarts, such as the daily cycling or a deploy, are not crashes, and are not reported. Only unexpected failures count.

How does it avoid repeating the same incident?

The crash is remembered by app and dyno. Further reports for the same ongoing incident are suppressed, and when the dyno recovers the memory is cleared, so a new crash triggers a fresh alert. This keeps ongoing trouble to a single message.

Can the alert go to PagerDuty or email instead?

Yes. Slack, email or another on-call tool can receive it. Name the destination to your AI assistant and approve the updated version before it runs. Whichever destination you choose, the message carries the app name and dyno, so on-call people know where to look first without opening the dashboard.

What permissions does it need?

read. Nothing else in your accounts is used.

Does it need AI?

No. It runs without AI, so it doesn't use your plan's AI allowance.

How many runs does it use?

One run for each event the app sends.

Can I change how it works?

Yes. Describe the change to your AI assistant, for example a different schedule, channel or filter. It updates the automation, tests it and tells you what changed.

Every 5 minutes