cron-doctor

What This Skill Does

The cron-doctor skill is an essential diagnostic utility for AI agents managing backend infrastructure. It automates the often tedious process of auditing cron job health, identifying silent failures, and triaging system task issues. By systematically scanning crontabs, inspecting logs across various operating systems (Linux/macOS), and mapping error patterns to specific solutions, the agent acts as a SRE-lite tool. It classifies job failures by impact—ranging from critical trading or backup operations to low-priority cleanup tasks—and formalizes the output into actionable health reports, ensuring that sysadmins and developers have a clear, documented path to remediation.

Installation

To install this skill, use the OpenClaw command-line interface: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/geq1fan/cron-doctor-clawra Ensure your agent has the necessary filesystem permissions to read logs (e.g., /var/log/syslog) and write report files to your local workspace directory.

Use Cases

• Routine System Audits: Periodically check if long-running scheduled tasks are still producing output or if they have silently crashed.
• Post-Failure Incident Response: When a critical backup fails or a scheduled sync stops working, use the doctor to parse logs and pinpoint whether the issue is a PATH problem, a permission error, or a dependency timeout.
• Onboarding/Environment Setup: New developers can use the tool to verify that all cron-based infrastructure is correctly configured on a fresh server instance.
• Reporting: Automatically generate standardized health reports for team documentation or project status updates.

Example Prompts

1. "Check the current status of all my cron jobs and tell me if any critical ones have failed in the last 24 hours."
2. "My backup job isn't running. Can you diagnose why it failed and suggest a fix?"
3. "Run a full health check on the system cron jobs and generate a report in the workspace folder for today."

Tips & Limitations

• Permissions: If the agent fails to read logs, ensure the user running the agent has sufficient read access to system log directories; you may need to grant it sudoer privileges for specific log files.
• PATH Issues: Cron environments differ significantly from interactive shells. Always use full paths to executables in your crontab and remember that the tool checks env output for a reason.
• Escalation: The agent is configured to alert you immediately if more than three critical jobs are detected as failing. Monitor your notifications for these critical incidents.