I built a cron monitoring feature because of a comment on my Dev.to article

I wrote a post about a cron job failure mode nobody talks about — jobs that don't die, they just drag. It got some traction.

Then a reader left a comment that stopped me:

"The failure mode I keep seeing: the job runs, logs 'complete,' and the output silently goes nowhere. Don't check that the job ran; check that the downstream artifact exists."

They were right. I'd only solved half the problem.

Duration monitoring catches "job ran slow." Silence detection catches "job didn't run." Neither catches "job ran fine but produced nothing." That's a third failure mode — and almost every monitoring tool ignores it.

So I built output assertions into https://deadmancheck.io. Your job pings the monitor with a count of what it actually did. If it processed zero records, you get alerted — even though the job technically ran fine.

Still early, bootstrapped, open source. Free plan available, $12/mo for the paid tier.

Full write-up here if you want the detail: https://dev.to/krissv/a-reader-comment-made-me-realise-id-only-solved-half-the-problem-3cpg