5 Cron Jobs Every Small IT Team Should Ship This Week

Description and use

Five simple cron jobs that replace manual checks and prevent outages in small IT teams.

Small IT teams often lack assigned tooling tasks, leading to recurring manual checks and outages.

The five cron jobs replace manual, error‑prone checks with reliable, automated alerts and reports, reducing on‑call fatigue and preventing outages.

1. Create a disk‑full early warning script that checks /var usage every 30 minutes and emails ops if usage exceeds 80%.
2. Schedule a backup verification job that runs every Monday at 4 AM to test the latest backup tarball and log success or failure.
3. Set up a daily certificate expiry countdown that queries each domain’s TLS cert and emails ops if any expire within 14 days.
4. Run a weekly service fragility report that collects systemd error and restart logs, aggregates the most frequent failures, and emails ops on Mondays.
5. Generate a weekly change inventory by committing /etc changes with etckeeper and emailing a diff every Friday evening.

Most small IT teams don't have a tooling problem. They have a nobody-was-assigned-it problem.

Run it every 30 minutes. One afternoon of work buys you the difference between a note in your inbox and a dead server.

Archive integrity isn't a restore test, but it catches the silent‑corruption case that kills most "we have backups" stories.