Your cron job did not fail. It never ran.

Scheduled jobs like cron can fail silently by never starting, with only stale logs and no obvious errors.

The article recommends inverting monitoring: jobs should ping an external endpoint on start, completion, and failure instead of relying on exit codes alone.

A dead-man’s-switch approach lets monitoring alert when expected status pings never arrive, helping catch outages in critical automation like backups.