[INTPenis]

The problem isn't cron, cron is just a dumb execution tool.

The problem is that we don't have any way of alerting our monitoring systems from a cron job.

This is exactly what I've been implementing, a simple curl API call to our monitoring system when a cron job has run is all that we need. This puts the monitoring of cron into the same sphere as all other monitoring and puts the alert on a webpage where it can be found eventually by our 2nd line or our on-call personnel, instead of in someones mailbox.

Edit: And you don't need a fancy REST based API for your monitoring system to do this, ye ol' nagios agent could do it with some hacks.

The hard part is having the discipline to fix all your cron jobs in this way, but adding || true is already tantamount to this.

[bbrazil]

This is basically the approach we take with Prometheus, with the option to add in additional stats like duration and processed records too.

http://www.robustperception.io/monitoring-batch-jobs-in-pyth... is the full Python version, and the simple version is a bash one-liner too.