[quectophoton]

Thank you, this (and jillesvangurp's comment) sounds way more reasonable than the article's suggestion.

If I have a daily cron job that is copying files to a remote location (e.g. backups), and the _operation_ fails because for some reason the destination is not writable.

Your suggestion would get me _both_ alerts, as I want; the article's suggestion would not alert me about the operation failing because, after all, it's not something happening in the local system, the local program is well configured, and it's "working as expected" because it doesn't need neither code nor configuration fixing.

[__turbobrew__]

Agreed, I don’t get the OPs delineation between local and non-local error sources. If your code has a job to do it doesn’t matter if the error was local or non-local, the operator needs to know that the code is not doing its job. In the case of something like you cannot backup files to a remote you can try to contact the humans who own the remote or come up with an alternative backup mechanism.