StallRadar Past-Due Monitor for Action Scheduler

WooCommerce shows you this and then leaves you alone with it:

Action Scheduler: 848 past-due actions found; something may be wrong.

It does not say what is wrong, which plugin is responsible, or what to do. This plugin answers all three.

What it tells you

• Which hooks are backed up, grouped and counted — so instead of 848 unreadable rows you see “812 of these are subscription renewals”.
• Which plugin they probably come from, worked out from the hook name.
• How late the oldest one is, in plain words.
• Whether they are waiting or failing — a completely different problem with a completely different fix.

Why the queue stopped

The diagnostics check the causes that actually happen, and each one says what it means and what to do next:

• WP-Cron switched off in wp-config.php (DISABLE_WP_CRON) with no server cron job put in its place. This is the most common cause by a distance.
• The site cannot call itself — WP-Cron works by making a request to your own site, and if outbound requests are blocked that request silently never lands.
• The queue has not run in days, whatever the settings claim.
• Jobs failing rather than waiting, which points at a broken plugin instead of broken scheduling.
• A backlog too large to clear at the normal batch size.
• PHP execution limits cutting batches off part-way, so the same actions are retried forever.

Fixing it

• Run the queue now — processes a batch immediately. This is also the fastest test there is: if actions clear, your jobs are fine and nothing is triggering the queue automatically. If nothing clears, the jobs themselves are failing.
• Retry failed actions for one hook, keeping their arguments and history.
• Cancel a backlog for one hook, with a clear warning first about what will not happen.
• Daily email if the backlog grows past a number you choose. Stuck actions fail silently — without a warning, nobody finds out until a customer complains.

How this differs from the cleaner plugins

The existing tools in this area delete completed actions to shrink your database. That is useful housekeeping and it does nothing at all for actions that are stuck. If you are here because of the past-due warning, a cleaner will not help you.

This plugin does not delete anything on its own. Cancelling is marked, not deleted, so it stays visible afterwards and a mistake can be seen.

Works with

Anything that uses Action Scheduler — WooCommerce, WooCommerce Subscriptions, WPForms, Jetpack, MailPoet, Easy Digital Downloads and many more.

Free and Pro

Everything described above is free, permanently, including the daily email alert.

Pro adds things that are not in this plugin at all:

• Check every hour instead of once a day, so a broken queue is caught within an hour rather than the following morning.
• Slack and webhook alerts. A Slack incoming webhook gets a readable message; any other HTTPS endpoint gets JSON with the same numbers in named fields.
• A record of the backlog over time, and a plain answer to the question a single number cannot settle: is this rising or draining?
• Unattended retrying of failed actions at each check, bounded so a hook that fails for a real reason cannot be retried forever.

Pro is a separate download, sold through Freemius: StallRadar Pro — $39 a year for one site, with 5, 10 and 20-site licences for agencies. None of that code is in this plugin. Nothing here is switched off or waiting for a key; what you install is the whole of what you get.