[nelgaard]

I do something similar, but simpler.

E.g., for rolling daily backups, something like

ls -l *.backup | mail -s "backup done" [e-mail], [e-mail]

even for successful cron jobs. That way you can check file sizes, timestamps, etc.

That way I will notice if something is not working, even if emails are also not working, the server is down etc. It requires of course that you actually read those emails. But at least if people have accepted to check them, they cannot complain. Well, they can of course, but then I can also blame them.

[BlackPearl02]

That's a clever approach! I used to do something similar, but found I'd miss emails or they'd get buried.

The tool I built does something similar but automated - it watches for a ping after your job completes and can validate the results (file sizes, timestamps, counts, etc.). You set validation rules once, and it only alerts when something's actually wrong. No need to read through daily emails.

For your backup example, you'd ping it with the file size, and it alerts if the size is unexpectedly small or zero. Same idea, just automated.