Heartbeat Monitoring

Heartbeat monitoring flips the usual model: instead of a monitor reaching out to check a service, the service (or scheduled job) periodically sends a signal to say “I ran.” If that expected heartbeat doesn’t arrive within its window, the monitor raises an alert. This makes it ideal for things that don’t accept inbound traffic — cron jobs, backups, batch pipelines, and data syncs.

It closes a common blind spot: a job can fail silently and go unnoticed until something downstream breaks. Heartbeat checks are one of several methods, alongside HTTP and port checks, that contribute to overall uptime coverage in uptime monitoring.