Heartbeat monitors
A heartbeat monitor is inverted — instead of Pulse reaching out to your service, your service
checks in with Pulse. If a ping doesn't arrive in time, the monitor goes DOWN. This is the way
to monitor things Pulse can't reach directly: cron jobs, batch pipelines, queue workers and
scheduled backups.
Fields
| Field | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Grace period (s) | No | How long after the expected ping before the monitor is considered DOWN. Defaults to 300. |
How it works
- Create the heartbeat monitor. Pulse gives you a unique ping URL.
- Have your job send an HTTP request to that URL each time it runs successfully.
- If Pulse doesn't receive a ping within the interval plus the grace period, the monitor
flips to
DOWNand can trigger alerts.
Example — cron job
Add a ping at the end of your job so it only fires on success:
# your backup script
run_backup && curl -fsS "https://pulse.servilo.in/acme/api/…/heartbeat-url"
Tip
Set the grace period a little longer than your job's normal runtime jitter, so a slightly slow run doesn't cause a false alarm.