Silence is the default
A web request that fails produces an angry user. A nightly job that fails produces nothing at all, so the feedback loop that catches every other kind of bug simply doesn’t exist here.
Alert on not running
Most monitoring watches for errors, which misses the job that never started because a scheduler was reconfigured or a machine was replaced. Expecting a completion signal within a window catches both failure and absence — the invisible-failure problem in its purest form.
A job that errors tells you something. A job that never ran tells you nothing, which is worse.
Make them re-runnable
When a job fails on Saturday and is noticed on Monday, someone has to run it for the missed period. Jobs that can be run for a specific range without duplicating work turn that into a command rather than an incident — the same idempotence a migration needs.
Watch for the overlap
As data grows, a job that took two minutes takes forty, and eventually the next run starts before the last finished. That produces duplicates and races that look like data corruption, because they are.
Log what they did, not that they ran
Records processed, skipped, and failed — enough to answer questions later. “Job completed” is not a useful log line when someone asks why three customers didn’t get invoiced.
Give them owners too
Scheduled jobs are the classic unowned integration: written once, forgotten, load-bearing. Each one needs a name attached and a note saying what breaks if it stops.