And when that last way fails, what do you do?

I like to have a separate monitoring process that monitors my process and a separate machine in a different datacenter monitoring that. But at the end of the day, the first process is still going to do try to log, detect that it failed, try the final backup log and then signal to its monitor that it’s in a bad state. It won’t make any decisions that depend on whether the final backup logging succeeds or fails.

I'm not working on anything life-critical, one additional layer of redundancy is all I budget for. If both my database is down and my local filesystem is full simultaneously, things have gone bad and I've likely got lots of other symptoms I'm going to find to direct me.