Skip to content

Heartbeat Monitoring

Heartbeat monitoring enables you to use OpsDuty to monitor periodic jobs running at intervals or on a defined CRON schedule. Configuration for heartbeat monitoring can be managed on the heartbeats page.

Heartbeat Overview

A heartbeat in OpsDuty is associated with a service, which can represent either a technical component of your infrastructure or a business unit.

Each heartbeat requires the following:

  • Name: A unique identifier for the heartbeat.
  • Metadata: Additional information such as a description and link can be provided.
  • Incident Urgency: Configures the urgency level of incidents created when the job misses a check-in.
  • Labels: Heartbeats can be tagged with labels for categorization.

Environments

Heartbeats do not define the job's actual schedule or execution details. Instead, this information is configured in heartbeat environments. A heartbeat can have multiple environments, each with its own schedule, typically representing different infrastructure environments or tenants.

Environment Configuration

Each heartbeat environment includes the following settings:

  • Name: The environment's name, typically prod, staging, or a specific identifier like prod:eu for regional configurations.
  • Type: The job's schedule type. cron for jobs running on a CRON schedule. interval for jobs running at constant intervals.
  • Timeout: The expected duration of the job. Alerts are generated if no check-in is reported before the next scheduled execution time plus the timeout. Adding a buffer to the timeout helps avoid overly sensitive alerts.
  • Muted: A muted environment will not generate alerts.
  • Resolve Incidents: Resolves any open incidents created by the same environment when the job successfully checks in again.

Creating and Updating Heartbeat Environments

OpsDuty allows bulk creation and updating of environments. When updating an environment, you can apply changes across all existing environments by selecting the option: Copy heartbeat and alerting configuration to all existing environments.

Registering Check-Ins

Periodic jobs must be configured to send a ping (check-in) to OpsDuty upon successful execution. This is done by sending an HTTP GET or POST request to the environment-specific check-in URL, which you can copy using the button in the Check-in URL column for each environment.

  • Authentication: The check-in URL does not require authentication.
  • Rate limit: Check-ins are limited to 5 requests per minute per environment. Requests above that limit are rejected with a HTTP 429 status code and do not register a check-in.

Programmatic Management of Heartbeats and Environments

Managing numerous Heartbeats and Environments manually can be tedious. OpsDuty provides tools for automation:

  • API: The OpsDuty API enables you to programmatically configure Heartbeats and Environments.
  • CLI: Use the OpsDuty CLI to import and export Heartbeats and Environments for streamlined management.