Who will watch the watchmen, right? :D It's a real concern. Personally, i have a monitoring agent running, and then i have the config management agent (puppet) validate that the monitoring agent is running.
And what Dewey said is absolutely right - you can monitor the code / service itself through health checks. In the case of a reports service, perhaps your monitor asks the API for a very small report. Or you could implement a special endpoint / controller that calls on the core code. I recently implemented a monitor that emulates a typical user session, logging in, performing popular tasks, and logging out. If any step in that process has an error, i get an alert with the step listed, and i instantly have some idea of where things are jammed. In this manner, i don't need to have pre-defined log monitors for specific errors; i can catch novel error types by virtue of exercising the code and watching for the expected responses - 200 in the header, ability to perform tasks that are only available on login, checking for certain strings in the response, etc.
You instrument your code instead of just logging. To see that your metric export is working you can regularly export a simple value and check for it’s existence.
And what Dewey said is absolutely right - you can monitor the code / service itself through health checks. In the case of a reports service, perhaps your monitor asks the API for a very small report. Or you could implement a special endpoint / controller that calls on the core code. I recently implemented a monitor that emulates a typical user session, logging in, performing popular tasks, and logging out. If any step in that process has an error, i get an alert with the step listed, and i instantly have some idea of where things are jammed. In this manner, i don't need to have pre-defined log monitors for specific errors; i can catch novel error types by virtue of exercising the code and watching for the expected responses - 200 in the header, ability to perform tasks that are only available on login, checking for certain strings in the response, etc.