How to run production cron jobs without silent failures

Cron jobs are easy to set up and easy to forget. I have seen nightly imports fail for three days because the script printed an error, exited with zero, and nobody watched the log file. The app looked healthy because the web process was fine. The missing data only showed up when a customer asked why yesterday's report was empty. My rule now is that a production job is not done until it has ownersh…