Where is the cron log in your system?

Cron is an excellent utility tool that helps to schedule and run commands or scripts in UNIX based systems. Most people use cron to run periodic jobs at fixes times or intervals.

Monitoring cron jobs are tricky because there is no built-in mechanism in the system that you can use to notify you if they failed.

One way to check the cron job runs is by looking into the system logs. If you have a UNIX based system, then you can SSH and grep the logs.

All system activities are logged in /var/log/syslog file. If you want to filter only cron logs, then you can use a simple grep command as follows.

grep CRON /var/log/syslog

If you’re not a root user, then you might need to run the same command with sudo.

If checking logs every time is too much of manual work then give Cronhub a try. It makes it a breeze to monitor all your cron jobs in a simple dashboard. You will get alerts (email, slack and more channels) if any of your cron jobs fail to run on time.