[r38y]

You have to make sure your periodic tasks acts in such a way that if a piece fails, the rest doesn't execute (using && for instance). Then you would add hitting your special url the last thing to execute.

If you have a way of checking things like this, great! You should keep doing that!

[jiggy2011]

That is true, but makes the assumption that all scripts along the way will return the correct values on errors etc. Not always true for rushed in-house scripts.

You may also have to consider warning conditions which might be more catastrophic to your "pipe" that the original program would believe.