Heartbeat Monitoring
Detect silent background-job and scheduler failures.
Alertum heartbeat monitoring gives every cron job, background worker, and pipeline a unique endpoint to ping. If a ping doesn't arrive within your expected interval plus a grace window, Alertum creates an incident immediately.
How it works
Heartbeat monitoring expects periodic pings from workers, cron jobs, and pipelines. Missed signals open incidents quickly for workflows that fail without visible frontend impact.
Core capabilities
- ·Expected ping interval + grace window rules
- ·Dedicated heartbeat endpoint per job
- ·Missed-run incident creation
- ·Operational visibility for async workloads
Assertions and thresholds
- ·Expected signal interval assertion per worker or cron job
- ·Grace-window assertion before declaring missed heartbeat
- ·Missed-signal threshold to trigger incident creation
- ·Recovery assertion when heartbeat resumes in expected window
Typical use cases
- ·Nightly ETL and sync job supervision
- ·Webhook consumer reliability checks
- ·Background processor health assurance
Frequently asked questions
How does heartbeat monitoring work?
Each job gets a unique Alertum URL. After every successful run, the job sends an HTTP request to that URL. If the ping doesn't arrive within the expected interval plus grace window, an incident is opened.
Do I need to install an agent?
No — just add a single HTTP request (e.g., curl) at the end of your script. No agent, no SDK, no code changes to your job logic.
What is a grace window?
The grace window is an extra buffer time after the expected interval before Alertum declares a miss. Use it for jobs that occasionally run slightly late.
Can I monitor jobs in different programming languages?
Yes — any job that can make an HTTP request can send a heartbeat, regardless of language or environment.
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