GitHub Actions Crons That Actually Stay Green

7 daily crons, 2 starvation incidents that triggered the rewrite Health checks before work, not after, catch silent failures Queue-low alarm fires at 5 items, not at zero A cron is ignorable for 3 weeks only when failures are loud I run 7 GitHub Actions crons every day, and for two months I never looked at them. Then a content queue starved silently and I posted nothing for 4 days before noticing. Here is what I changed so a cron can stay green and be ignorable for 3 weeks straight. The Two Incidents That Forced The Rewrite The first starvation happened on a Tuesday. My image generation cron pulled prompts from a queue, made the assets, and pushed them to a publish queue. The image API returned a 429 (rate limited) and the job exited cleanly with a green checkmark. GitHub Actions reported success. The workflow logs said "0 prompts processed" in a line I never read. For 4 days the publish queue drained and nothing refilled it. I found out because a follower asked why I went quiet. The second incident was sneakier. A cron that calls an external API hit an auth token that had expired. The script caught the error, logged it, and returned exit code 0 because I had wrapped the whole thing in a try/except that swallowed everything. Green check, no work done. This one ran for 6 days before I caught it during an unrelated debug session. Both failures shared one root cause: a green checkmark in GitHub Actions means the process exited zero, not that the work happened. Those are completely different claims. A cron that catches its own errors and exits clean is lying to you in the most polite way possible. After the second incident I sat down and wrote out what I actually wanted. I wanted to never look at these workflows unless something was wrong. I wanted "wrong" to be loud. And I wanted the loudness to arrive before the damage, not after. That meant three changes. First, the exit code had to reflect real work, so swallowed exceptions had to re-raise or set a failure flag. Sec