Quartz.NET 4.4: Jobs Report What They Achieved, and a Health Check Notices When They Stop

Quartz.NET v4.4.0 shipped on October 7, 2026. The headline numbers are about clustering (triggers that are already due now fire in the transaction that acquires them, and on PostgreSQL 95 to 99 % of firings at 20 triggers a second land within 50 ms, up from 54 % on 4.3.0), but the change most application code will use is smaller: a job can finally say what its run achieved, and your health endpoint can act on it.

”It didn’t throw” is not “it worked”

Until 4.3, Quartz knew two outcomes: the job threw, or it did not. A cleanup job that found nothing to clean, a sync that bailed because the upstream API returned an empty page, and a run that did real work all looked identical in the history. And a nightly job whose trigger got paused or misfired for three days looked like nothing at all, because nothing failed.

Reporting a result with JobRunReport

In 4.4 a job sets context.Result to a JobRunReport. There are four results (Succeeded, Failed, Cancelled, Skipped), an optional summary of up to 1,000 characters, and metrics stored as AOT-safe JSON capped at 4,000 characters:

public sealed class ReleaseStaleReservationsJob : IJob
{
    public async ValueTask Execute(IJobExecutionContext context, CancellationToken cancellationToken = default)
    {
        int scanned = await CountReservations(cancellationToken);
        int released = await ReleaseStale(cancellationToken);

        context.Result = released == 0
            ? JobRunReport.Skipped("no stale reservations").With("scanned", scanned)
            : JobRunReport.Succeeded($"released {released}")
                .With("scanned", scanned)
                .With("released", released);
    }
}

The recorded result follows a fixed order: a cancelled firing is Cancelled, a job that threw is Failed, otherwise whatever you put in context.Result, otherwise Succeeded. Reporting JobRunReport.Failed(...) is not the same as throwing. Only a thrown exception drives the retry policy and OnFailure continuations, so report a failure when retrying would not help.

The history keeps a JobRunStatus per job (LastSucceededAtUtc, ConsecutiveFailures, LastFailureMessage, run and failure counts), retention can differ by result, and the quartz.job.execution.duration metric gains a quartz.job.result tag so your OpenTelemetry dashboards can split skipped runs from real ones.

A health check per job

This is the part I would turn on today. RequireSuccessWithin reports a job as unhealthy once it has not succeeded within a window, which catches the silent case: a paused trigger, a misfire, a job that keeps getting skipped by a veto.

builder.Services.AddQuartzExecutionHistory();

builder.Services.AddHealthChecks().AddQuartz(options =>
{
    // Degraded once the nightly report has not succeeded for 26 hours.
    options.RequireSuccessWithin(new JobKey("nightly-report", "reports"), TimeSpan.FromHours(26));

    // Unhealthy, so the node leaves rotation, after 90 minutes without a ledger close.
    options.RequireSuccessWithin(
        new JobKey("ledger-close", "billing"),
        TimeSpan.FromMinutes(90),
        HealthStatus.Unhealthy);
});

The default status is Degraded, and a Skipped run counts as a success, so the “nothing to do” path from the job above does not page anyone. The list can also be bound from configuration through RequiredJobs. If the execution history is off, the host fails at startup rather than reporting a check that can never pass.

Upgrading from 4.3

The release is additive: 4.3 code compiles unchanged, and every new interface member has a default implementation. If you use a persistent job store with the execution history on, run the 4.4/add_execution_outcome_<dialect>.sql script before the first 4.4 node starts. The release also adds a [RetryPolicy] attribute on job classes, q.RunAtStartup(jobKey), and Weasel schema management for MySQL, Oracle and Firebird, all covered in the migration guide and the job outcomes how-to.

If you are still on 4.2, the cron analyzer and [QuartzJob] source generator from 4.2 come along for free.