in software, one of the most important things you can do is giving form to the invisible. a framework for checking “last success” should support every cron, daemon, app server and regularly scheduled script.
it should be purposefully focused by not asking for a current running state and instead ask for “when did you last do your task successfully?” this creates a mindset of focusing on the bigger picture to avoid getting lost in little everyday problems
background processes are the plumbers which keep sites alive and we should focus on making sure all of them, every single cron on every machine, has a hook to the mothership so we know that the little guy is still ok
