Green Checks Can Mislead: Tracking Silent Failures in Cron Jobs, Workers and APIs

A successful exit or HTTP 200 does not guarantee that backend work actually ran or produced a correct result. The article argues that exception capture alone misses cases such as jobs that never start, workers that stall after beginning, and responses with invalid content. It recommends separate signals for missed schedules, unfinished runs, exceptions, and result validation, linked by a shared run ID. The author also advises against storing prompts, documents, or secrets in default telemetry, favoring metadata such as operation name, release, and elapsed time. Failure experiments are proposed as a way to test whether each alert actually fires.