Quick answer
Understand heartbeat monitoring, how missing signals reveal silent failures, and why it works well for cron jobs, workers, backups, and scheduled tasks.
Heartbeat monitoring in plain English
Heartbeat monitoring is a “prove you are still running” pattern. A process sends a signal at the expected interval. If the signal stops arriving, the external monitor raises an alert.
Where it works best
Use heartbeats for cron jobs, background workers, ETL processes, backup scripts, scheduled reports, and any task whose success is not visible through a public HTTP page.
Why the monitor should be external
If the application and its monitoring logic live on the same machine, one failure can hide both. An external heartbeat service provides a separate observation point.
What a heartbeat does not prove
A heartbeat only proves that the process reached the signal step. Put the heartbeat after your own success checks so that a script cannot report success before its important work has finished.
Sources and references
Related PingStag guides
Cron Job Monitoring: How to Detect Scheduled Jobs That Fail Silently
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How to Monitor Database Backups Before You Need to Restore One
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