I am using a Google Cloud virtual machine to run several python scripts scheduled on a cron, I am looking for some way to check that they ran.
When I look in my logs I see nothing, so I guess simply running a .py file is not logged? Is there a way to turn on logging at this level? What are the usual approaches for such things?
The technology for recording log information in GCP is called Stackdriver. You have a couple of choices for how to log within your application. The first is to instrument your code with Stackdriver APIs which explicitly write data to the Stackdriver subsytem. Here are the docs for that and here is further recipe.
A second story is that you install the Stackdriver Logging Agent on your Compute Engine. This will then allow you to tap into other sources of logging output such as local syslog.