Heartbeat monitoring, monitors any network device that is reachable through TCP/IP. Heartbeat monitoring itself is performed through the UptimeVerify.com Heartbeat Monitor service.
System Admins use heartbeats to monitor communication channels between an agent and the agent’s primary management server. A heartbeat is a packet of data sent from the agent to the management server on a regular basis, by default every 60 seconds, using port 5723 (UDP).
When an agent fails to send a heartbeat and if the computer does not respond to the ping monitoring; this means your server is 100% down.
Heartbeat is useful when you need to verify that you’re meeting your service level agreements for service uptime. It’s also useful for other scenarios, such as security use cases, when you need to verify that no one from the outside can access services on your private enterprise server.
You can configure Heartbeat to ping all DNS-resolvable IP addresses for a specified hostname. That way, you can check all services that are load-balanced to see if they are available.
When you configure heartbeat, you specify monitors that identify the hostnames that you want to check. Each monitor runs based on the schedule that you specify. For example, you can configure one monitor to run every 10 minutes, and a different monitor to run between the hours of 9:00 and 17:00.
You can create a heartbeat by selecting Heartbeats on your Dashboard.
You can configure time and grace period and what kind of reports you want by clicking “Advanced Settings“.
If you want to setup cron monitors, you may find this guide more helpful.
