A green status from a scheduled agent run tells you exactly one thing: the process started and exited without an infrastructure error. That's it. It does not tell you the task got done.
An agent that can't find its input, misreads the repo it cloned, or just decides there's nothing to do this time will exit cleanly. To your scheduler, that looks identical to a run that actually did the work. We ran a three-brand automation fleet where three separate scheduled jobs reported green for days — one week, in the worst case — while writing nothing at all. Nothing paged us. Nothing looked wrong from the outside.
Make the artifact the definition of success, not the exit code
The fix is smaller than it sounds: every scheduled job has to name, up front, the file it's supposed to write. A run is only ok if it wrote that file. Anything else — the job runs clean but produces nothing — gets recorded as no_op, which is a distinct status from ok, not a footnote inside it.
If you want to check this without touching the job's internals, hash the target file before the run and after. Unchanged hash, non-zero exit for your monitor. It's crude, but it turns a silent no-op into something your alerting can actually see.
