What is heartbeat and when to use it

In short: A heartbeat monitor will alert you when a task (typically a nightly backup, daily sync or other cron job) stops running. It works the opposite way to a classic uptime monitor - you send the "ping" towards ePulz.io, not we to your server.

When a heartbeat is useful

• Nightly database backups - you want to know if a backup fails at night
• Synchronization with an external service - import from CRM, accounting, payment processor
• Recurring invoicing - generating invoices, sending reminders
• Cleanup tasks - deleting old sessions, temp files, logs
• Reports and statistics - weekly/monthly reports
• Healthcheck of background workers - Celery, Sidekiq, BullMQ

How it works

1. In ePulz.io you create a heartbeat monitor with the expected interval (e.g. every hour, every night at 3:00, etc.)
2. You receive a unique heartbeat URL - looks like https://epulz.io/heartbeat/abc123xyz
3. You add this URL at the end of your cron script / task
4. When the task finishes successfully, it "pings" this URL
5. If the ping does not arrive at the expected time (+ grace period), ePulz.io alerts you

Practical example

Imagine a nightly database backup that runs every day at 3:00 am and takes ~5 minutes:

1. You create a heartbeat monitor named "Nightly DB backup", interval 1440 minutes (24 hours), grace 15 minutes
2. To the backup script you add: after a successful backup, call the heartbeat URL
3. Every day after 3:05 ePulz.io expects a ping. If it does not come by 3:15 (interval + grace), it will send you an alert

Interval vs Grace

• Interval - how often the heartbeat should arrive (e.g. every hour = 60 minutes)
• Grace - tolerance, how long to wait after the expected time before we trigger an alert

Practical values:

Get started

In the next step we show the exact procedure for creating a heartbeat monitor in the ePulz.io dashboard.