Blog
On silent failures.
Plain writing on the jobs that stop without telling anyone: cron, backups, scheduled tasks, and how to make silence set off the alarm.
Troubleshooting · 23 Jul 2026
My script works when I run it, but not from cron
Runs fine by hand, does nothing on schedule. The usual environment culprits (PATH, working directory, variables, an unescaped %) and their fixes.
How-to · 16 Jul 2026
How to monitor a cron job with Mortemain (in 3 steps)
Create a check, add one curl to your crontab, then test it. A three-step walkthrough to catch a cron that silently stops.
Monitoring · 8 Jul 2026
5 critical tasks to monitor with Mortemain (and why)
Backups, cron, CI/CD, data syncs and certificate renewals: the five whose silent failure hurts most, and the one line each needs.
Monitoring · 1 Jul 2026
Why your monitoring tools miss silent failures
Error-based monitoring can only alert on signals it receives, so a job that never runs stays green. Here's the blind spot, and how a dead man's switch closes it.