CronManager is a tool written in Go that is used as a wrapper to start cron job. The application does the following:

1. Executes the command
2. Measures the command execution time
3. Examines the command exit status The tool uses Node Exporter's TextFile collector to publish the alert to Prometheus.

For the tool to work correctly, you need to have Prometheus node exporter installed on the machine with the textfile collector enabled and the directory specified. For example, the node exporter command should be run as follows:

/opt/prometheus/exporters/node_exporter_current/node_exporter --collector.conntrack --collector.diskstats --collector.entropy --collector.filefd --collector.filesystem --collector.loadavg --collector.mdadm --collector.meminfo --collector.netdev --collector.netstat --collector.stat --collector.time --collector.vmstat --web.listen-address=0.0.0.0:9100 --log.level=info --collector.textfile --collector.textfile.directory=/opt/prometheus/exporters/dist/textfile

You can also provide custom collector textfile location using environment variable COLLECTOR_TEXTFILE_PATH

EXPORT COLLECTOR_TEXTFILE_PATH = /custom/path/to/textfile
/opt/prometheus/exporters/node_exporter_current/node_exporter --collector.conntrack --collector.diskstats --collector.entropy --collector.filefd --collector.filesystem --collector.loadavg --collector.mdadm --collector.meminfo --collector.netdev --collector.netstat --collector.stat --collector.time --collector.vmstat --web.listen-address=0.0.0.0:9100 --log.level=info --collector.textfile --collector.textfile.directory=$COLLECTOR_TEXTFILE_PATH

Build the binary:

env GOOS=linux go build -o cronmanager

Move the program to a directory in your $PATH

sudo mv cronmanager /usr/local/bin/

The program can be used as follows:

cronmanager -c command -n jobname [ -t time in seconds ] [ -l log file ]

Both command and jobname are mandatory arguments. Notice that you cannot a bash shell or any of its shell built-ins as the command. So, the following examples will not work:

cronmanager -c "echo 'hello' > somefile"
cronmanager -c "command1; command2; command3"

The expected command is a binary file with optional arguments. For example, the following are valid commands for cronmanager:

cronmanager -c "/usr/bin/php /var/www/webdir/console broadcast:entities:updated -e project -l 20000"
cronmanager -c "/usr/bin/python3 /path/to/python_script.py"

Additional -i parameter adds sleep at the end of the process to let Prometheus to notice something is happening. It's going to sleep for 60 seconds minus anything that had happened before that. That means that if the command takes 20 seconds to finish the sleep at the end will be 40 seconds.

-c: The command to execute (required). This parameter is required. Please see the Usage section for caveats.

-n: The job name (required). It's a good practice to append _cron to the job name for easier distinction when viewing the alerts on Prometheus or Graffana.

-t: the time in seconds after which cronmanager will alert that the job is taking more than it should. The default is 3600 seconds (1 hour).

-l: the log file were you want the cron job to write its output. The default is that any output is trashed.

Notice that if don't specify -n followed by a name, the command will default to "Generic" as the job name.

For the tool to work, the /opt/prometheus/exporters/dist/textfile/ path must exist on the machine with permissions for the user running cronmanager to write to it. This is the default path where the exporter files exist.

Once cronmanager starts a job, it will wait for the specified seconds (using -t or the default 3600 seconds). If the cron is still running, cronmanager writes to a file under the exporters path. The file name consists of the job name followed by the .prom extension. For example, if you run the command like this cronmanager -c "some_command some_arguments" -n "myjob" the following file will be created: /opt/prometheus/exporters/dist/textfile/myjob.prom. The contents of the file are as follows:

# HELP cronjob metric generated by cronmanager
# TYPE cronjob gauge
cronjob{"name=cron1","dimension=failed"} 0
cronjob{"name=cron1","dimension=delayed"} 0
cronjob{"name=cron1","dimension=duration"} 10

The numbers change to 1 depending on the issue found with the cron job (delayed/failed or both).