What is Heartbeat monitoring?
Also called: cron monitoring, dead man's switch monitoring
Heartbeat monitoring is a technique where a job pings a unique URL upon completion, allowing the monitor to detect if the job failed to run or hung.
Heartbeat monitoring is a technique where a job pings a unique URL upon completion, allowing the monitor to detect if the job failed to run or hung.
It catches jobs that never ran, hung, or ran on a host that was switched off, which no outside-in check can see. A cron job, backup or batch process pings a unique URL when it finishes. If the ping does not arrive within the expected period plus a grace window, the heartbeat is considered missed and an alert is raised.
A ping is typically a single curl line appended to the job: curl -fsS https://