title: System for monitoring cron jobs and automated tasks?
body: <p>I have several cron-jobs and background tasks on a variety of servers.  These tasks can fail for any number of reasons:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>lack of disk space</li>
  <li>processing strange, unreadable file types</li>
  <li>logical errors/bugs in the programs</li>
  <li>invalid cron entry</li>
  <li>invalid json received</li>
  <li>network connectivity failure</li>
  <li>db locks</li>
  <li>system library update breaks program</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Why they failed to run is important, but the most important thing is knowing they failed to run.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a uniform way to monitor multiple jobs, and be alerted if they fail to run at their scheduled time, for any reason?  I'm using Ubuntu, the scripts are primarily in Ruby.</p>
  
  <p>Note: </p>
  
  <p>I'm specifically looking for a framework or system that works across multiple servers, and that has alerting via email or text built in, and one that can survive limited disk-space.  So the solution presented in 
  <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3446405/how-can-i-setup-a-system-to-tell-me-if-a-cron-job-is-not-running-fine">How can I setup a system to tell me if a cron job is NOT running fine?</a> doesn't seem applicable.</p>