Observium Install script cron issue, poller broken

Doing a fresh install of Observium on a new Debian 11 vm creates /etc/cron.d/observium  entries however the poller never runs.  The cron entries are configured to run as the observium user.  Changing the observium user to root fixed this but I am assuming that is not ideal.  Could be a permissions issue with the observium user, which I did verify the script created:

1. less /etc/passwd | grep observium
   observium:x:1001:1001::/home/observium:/bin/sh