Story

I've been running into this issue where my cron jobs "succeed" but don't actually do their job correctly.

For example:

Backup cron runs, exit code 0, but creates empty files

Data sync completes successfully but only processes a fraction of records

Report generator finishes but outputs incomplete data

The logs say everything's fine, but the results are wrong. Actually, the errors are probably in the logs somewhere, but who checks logs proactively? I'm not going through log files every day to see if something silently failed.

I've tried:

Adding validation in scripts - works, but you still need to check the logs

Webhook alerts - but you have to write connectors for every script

Error monitoring tools - but they only catch exceptions, not wrong results

I ended up building a simple monitoring tool that watches job results instead of just execution - you send it the actual results (file size, count, etc.) and it alerts if something's off. No need to dig through logs.

But I'm curious: how do you all handle this? Are you actually checking logs regularly, or do you have something that proactively alerts you when results don't match expectations?