Had a backup script running via cron for months. Worked fine until it didn’t — turns out the disk filled up three weeks ago and the job started failing silently. Nobody noticed until we actually needed a restore.
The obvious answer is “check your logs” but let’s be honest, nobody’s reading cron logs daily for 15 different scheduled tasks across 4 servers.
What’s your setup for making sure crons are actually completing? Do you just grep logs periodically, or do you have something more structured? Curious how others handle this without turning it into a whole project.
Monitor your logs with a network monitoring tool like Nagios, Icinga, etc. You can set filters for alerts you are genuinely interested in, and email the alerts to your ticketing system or sysads.
Graylog is excellent for catching all the logs from different system and filtering them according to your tastes into email alerts.