Question of the Week: Where can I find my cron job logs?

Emre,
This week we have a simple question about cron logs, that kept getting more nuanced as we answered it.


Where can I find my cron job logs?

Cron logs are written to /var/log/syslog on Ubuntu and Debian, and /var/log/cron on RedHat and CentOS.
Show recent cron events in your syslog (Ubuntu and Debian):
grep CRON /var/log/syslog | tail -10
Show recent cron events in the cron log (RedHat and CentOS):
tail -10 /var/log/cron
You will likely require root/sudo privileges to access these logs.


What you'll find in the logs

Logs are written by the cron daemon when it starts-up, when it executes each job, and when it has an error reading a crontab file
or running a requested command. Cron logs will not contain any of your cron job output or even their exit statuses.
If you are a CronitorCLI or Kubernetes user, complete job output and exit code is captured for every execution and is available on
your dashboard in the "Latest Activity" section of each job.


How to read your cron logs

Cron logs store the hostname of the machine, the time the job was started, the user account, and the command run. In this example,
a cron job ran on March 29th, on the data-processing host as the dataproc user. The command executed was /home/data-pipeline.py
Mar 29 16:15:01 data-processing CRON[12624]: (dataproc) CMD (/home/data-pipeline.py)

View on the Web [https://cronitor.io/guides/where-are-cron-logs-stored]



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nse/cronitor/2026-11-08/6408

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Cronitor · support@cronitor.io

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8 November 2026 · 22:00 UTC