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What is heartbeat monitoring?

Last updated .

Heartbeat monitoring, also called a dead man’s switch, a check-in or push monitoring, reverses the direction of an uptime check. The monitor gives a job a unique URL; the job requests it on success; if no request arrives within the expected period plus a grace time, the monitor alerts.

Definition
Heartbeat monitoring
A monitor that expects a signal from a scheduled job within a time window and alerts when none arrives; also called a dead man’s switch.

Why it exists

Scheduled jobs fail by not happening, and a missing run leaves no error to catch. Backups, imports, report emails, subscription renewals and cache jobs are typical. A heartbeat also works for jobs the monitor cannot reach, such as those behind a firewall.

Setting it up

Choose the period (how often the job runs) and a grace time longer than the job’s normal run time and jitter. Send the signal only after the work has succeeded, for instance with job && curl .... Keep the URL secret and send alerts to a person.

A WordPress note

WP-Cron runs on page loads, not on a clock, so tasks on low-traffic sites can run late. A heartbeat shows the delay.

An example

At the end of a backup script: curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://monitor.example/hb/TOKEN. Many services also accept a start signal and a failure signal: the start records how long the run took, and the failure signal alerts at once instead of after the grace time. For a nightly job that takes about 10 minutes, a period of 24 hours and a grace time of 30 minutes means an alert half an hour after the expected time if nothing arrives.

What to check

That every important job has a heartbeat, that a missing signal reaches a person and that a restore, not only a run, is tested.

Sources

Read on . Standards and vendor pages change; confirm the current text before you rely on it.

Guides that use this term

  • Cron jobA cron job is a task scheduled to run at set times on a server. Why it fails silently, how WP-Cron differs from system cron and how to monitor it.
  • Uptime monitoringUptime monitoring requests a website from outside at intervals and alerts when it fails to answer. What it measures, what it misses and how it is confirmed.
  • Check intervalThe check interval is the time between two uptime checks. How it sets the detection delay, the number of checks and how it interacts with confirmation.

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