Logging cron job output vs actually monitoring it

Been running a handful of scheduled tasks on two VPS instances for about a year now — nightly DB dumps, cache warmers, a couple of data sync scripts. Had everything piped to log files and thought I was covered. Then last month one of the sync scripts started hanging mid-execution. It never crashed, never threw an error, just… sat there. The log showed the start timestamp but no finish line. Took me four days to notice because I wasn’t checking logs daily (who does). After that I looked into what people use to catch this kind of thing. What I tried: Healthchecks.io [http://Healthchecks.io] — solid, does the job. You curl a URL at the end of your cron and if the ping doesn’t arrive within the expected window, you get an alert. Simple concept. I also tested WatchCron [https://watchcron.com/] which works on the same principle but felt a bit snappier to set up for multiple jobs. Has a dashboard that shows timing patterns across runs, which helped me spot that one of my backup jobs was gradually taking longer each week — would’ve missed that with just pass/fail alerts. The pattern that works for me now: bash #!/bin/bash # at the end of each cron script curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 $MONITOR_URL > /dev/null If the script hangs or exits early, the ping never fires, and I get a Slack notification within minutes. One thing I changed — I stopped redirecting cron output to /dev/null. Feels obvious in hindsight but I see it everywhere in tutorials. If your task does fail, you want that output in the mail spool or a log, not gone. What’s your setup for catching silent failures? Curious if anyone’s doing something beyond the “ping on success” model — like tracking execution duration or exit codes.