Monitoring fundamentals
Heartbeat vs Health Check: What's the Difference?
A health check is usually an observer asking an application whether it is ready. A heartbeat is the application sending evidence that it is alive.
Two directions, two questions
| Pattern | Direction | Question |
|---|---|---|
| Health check | Monitor → application | Can this service respond and is it ready for traffic? |
| Heartbeat | Application → monitor | Did this process or job reach its reporting point? |
Why one does not replace the other
A ready HTTP endpoint does not prove that a background worker or scheduled import is running. Conversely, a worker heartbeat does not prove that the public API can serve requests or that all dependencies are healthy.
Use them together
Use health checks for traffic readiness and service dependency checks. Use heartbeats for work that runs on a schedule, runs in a private network or needs to report from its own execution context. Logs, metrics and traces add the detail needed to diagnose failure.
HeartbeatHook implements the heartbeat and authenticated signal side. It is not a full observability platform. Start with heartbeat monitoring or read the API contract.