Seems like you have a good alternative that doesn’t require a script, but for tasks like this I like to recommend the book Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. It’s free to read online, and if I recall correctly has essentially exactly this task as one of the exercises.

Is there anything in the journal? If you’re not familiar, try something like journalctl -o short-precise -k -b -1 and then look for anything weird.