Monitor and auto restart cron service using cPanel chkservd

It is necessary to monitor the cron service and auto-restart it. cPanel offers ‘chkservd’, a monitoring daemon that monitors the services on the server and restart them if found offline. cPanel/WHM do not provide an option to include the ‘crond’ service under the monitoring daemon, so following are the steps you can follow to achieve it:

Create a crond file under the chkservd.d directory where all the services files are placed:

    vim  /etc/chkserv.d/crond

Add the following and save the file:

    service[crond]=x,x,x,/etc/init.d/crond restart,crond,root

Now you need to edit the chkservd configuration file and enable the crond service for monitoring

vim /etc/chkserv.d/chkservd.conf

add the following line at the end of the file

    crond:1

Now, save the file and restart the chkservd service for the new changes to take affect:

     /scripts/restartsrv chkservd

In order to verify if chkservd auto-restarts the crond service if found offline, stop the service manually

     service crond stop

and watch the logs

     tail -f /var/log/chkservd.log

You will notice that the crond service is restarted automatically within 5 minutes.