Product / Dead Hand Monitor
Dead Hand Monitor
Detect processes that are alive but no longer making progress.
Product layer not yet implementedA heartbeat is not proof of progress
Dead Hand Monitor is HeartbeatHook's name for progress-freshness monitoring. The surrounding problem language is established: stuck process monitoring, stale worker detection, progress monitoring and alive-but-stuck processes. The product name itself is HeartbeatHook terminology, not an established industry standard.
09:00 heartbeat OK progress=184
09:01 heartbeat OK progress=185
09:02 heartbeat OK progress=186
healthy progress
09:10 heartbeat OK progress=201
09:11 heartbeat OK progress=201
09:12 heartbeat OK progress=201
process alive
progress staleHow the model should work
The application sends a business-defined progress marker alongside its heartbeat. The server compares freshness and change over an appropriate active-work window. HeartbeatHook does not need to understand whether the marker is a record number, batch ID, cursor, sequence or phase; that meaning remains application-defined.
Advantages
- detects a failure class that heartbeat-only monitoring can miss;
- fits workers and processing systems with measurable progress;
- keeps business semantics in the application;
- can distinguish liveness from movement.
Limitations
The application must provide a meaningful marker. Unchanged progress can be normal during an idle phase, so active/idle semantics and thresholds are essential. A poor marker creates false positives, and progress freshness does not replace metrics, traces or business validation.
Availability boundary
The current HPH implementation does not evaluate progress markers or expose a Dead Hand state. This page defines the product direction and the problem it is intended to solve; it is not a claim that the feature is live.