Cron process monitoring

[Danesh Qureshi]

I am looking into a procedure whereby I can monitor the status of cron process.I had a situation cron had "died" and none of scheduled scripts ran in crontab. By the time we realised that cron had died it was too late.

So for example if the cron process was killed by the system due to swap space running out, is there a way to notify (perhaps via email) an administrator straight away that cron is not running anymore and needs to be restarted?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Dan..

PS
My email is d.qureshi@mdx.ac.uk

[Ivan Ferreira]

You could install swatch. Swatch is a tool that monitors log files and if a pattern is found, an event is triggered. This event can be restart cron or send a mail.

I never installed it on tru64.

http://swatch.sourceforge.net/

[AwadheshPandey]

performance manager is third party software you can install for managing such events. try it.

Awadhesh

[Ivan Ferreira]

BTW, to use swatch is supposed that in the cron log, a failure message is found.

[Shirley I Taylor]

Regarding this issue of cron stopping in the first place. We have had this happen 3 times on 2 different servers running Tru64 5.1B-3. Anyone know why cron dies in the first place? We have searched log files for information but find nothing. Also, I don't see any bug reports or patches relating to this issue. Thanks,
Shirley