Heartbeat Monitoring

Overview

Heartbeat monitoring works differently from other health check types. Instead of upti.my reaching out to check your service (pull-based), your service sends periodic signals to upti.my (push-based). If an expected heartbeat is not received within the configured window, upti.my triggers an alert.

This is the ideal monitoring approach for cron jobs, batch processes, scheduled tasks, background workers, data pipelines, and any process that runs on a schedule. These workloads cannot be effectively monitored with pull-based checks because there is no persistent endpoint to probe.

How It Works

1. Create a heartbeat check in upti.my and receive a unique ping URL
2. Configure your cron job or scheduled task to send an HTTP request to the ping URL after each successful run
3. upti.my records each heartbeat and tracks whether they arrive on time
4. If a heartbeat is missed (not received within the expected interval), an alert is triggered

Ping URL

Each heartbeat check has a unique URL that your service pings:

https://agents.upti.my/v1/heartbeat/your-token

Replace your-token with the unique token assigned to your heartbeat check. You can find this token in your check's configuration page in the upti.my dashboard.

Sending Heartbeats

Sending a heartbeat is as simple as making an HTTP request to your ping URL. Any HTTP method works, but GET and POST are most common.

Using curl

# Simple heartbeat ping
curl -s https://agents.upti.my/v1/heartbeat/your-token

# Heartbeat with custom body (e.g., job result)
curl -s -X POST \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"status":"completed","records_processed":1500}' \
  https://agents.upti.my/v1/heartbeat/your-token

In a Cron Job

# Run backup script every day at 2 AM, then ping heartbeat
0 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -s https://agents.upti.my/v1/heartbeat/your-token

In Application Code

import requests

def run_scheduled_task():
    # Your task logic here
    process_data()

    # Send heartbeat on completion
    requests.get(
        "https://agents.upti.my/v1/heartbeat/your-token",
        timeout=10
    )

Response Data

Each received heartbeat is recorded with comprehensive metadata:

Common Use Cases

• Cron Jobs - Monitor database backups, log rotation, report generation, and cleanup scripts
• Batch Processes - Track ETL pipelines, data imports, and batch computations
• Scheduled Tasks - Verify that Windows Task Scheduler or systemd timers run on time
• Background Workers - Monitor queue consumers, email senders, and async processors
• Renewal Jobs - Ensure certificate renewals, token rotations, and license checks execute