Heartbeat Monitoring for Applications, Jobs and Services

What heartbeat monitoring means

A heartbeat is a small outbound request sent by the system being observed. It can show that a worker is still running, a scheduled task reached a checkpoint, or an application completed a cycle. The important detail is direction: the application reports to the monitor.

That differs from an external probe that calls the application and asks for a health response. Both patterns are useful, but they answer different questions.

How the pattern works

1. The application or job creates a signed heartbeat request.
2. HeartbeatHook authenticates the request and records the application state.
3. The team can reason about recent evidence of life and the expected reporting interval.

HeartbeatHook's current Tier 1 HTTP contract provides HMAC-SHA256 authentication, timestamp and nonce validation, replay protection, and application-scoped rate limits. Read the Heartbeat API reference for the exact request fields.

What should send a heartbeat?

• scheduled jobs and cron tasks;
• background workers and long-running processes;
• data imports and synchronization jobs;
• applications running behind NAT, a firewall or shared hosting;
• remote installations that can make outbound HTTPS requests.

What happens when heartbeats stop?

A missing heartbeat is evidence that needs interpretation. The scheduler may have stopped, the machine may be unavailable, the script may have failed before its reporting step, or the application may have lost network access. HeartbeatHook records the signal contract; it does not claim to send an alert or diagnose the underlying failure.

Heartbeat monitoring versus uptime monitoring

Uptime monitoring usually sends a request to a public endpoint and checks the response. Heartbeat monitoring receives an outbound report from the system itself. Uptime checks are useful for public availability. Heartbeats are useful when the system is private, intermittent, or responsible for work that cannot be observed by simply opening a URL.

How HeartbeatHook fits

HeartbeatHook is a focused application heartbeat and signal relay. It does not replace logs, metrics, tracing or an incident notification system. It gives applications an authenticated way to report and gives other applications an authenticated polling path for pending signals.