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Comment by mrweasel

10 hours ago

If you need/want a dashboard it's kinda cool. There's a lot of other options that will do something similar, but not via SSH. Crontab can email you directly, no need for a service.

You could also just use systemd timers and do: systemctl --failed -t service

You are missing the biggest value offering here - service such as the one linked here (or healthchecks io that I personally use) will let you know that signal didn't arrive even when other things on your end failed (e.g. cron having a hard time sending failure email due to incorrect smtp credentials). I use those kind of healthchecks literally for everything, especially for backups - they saved my ass many times over.

  • For things that actually matters to me, I use systemd timers, Prometheus and alert on failed services, but I do get that this might be a bit much for many setups.

You need some sort of external monitor for a missed pulse style alert. Personally I do something similar by collecting a "last success" metric with Prometheus and alerting on it with Grafana if the value is too far in the past. The local system cannot reliably alert if your job does not fail into the alert path or the system is just down.

I can see something like this being a great intermediate option to a full monitoring and alerting stack.