💓 Heartbeat Monitor

The Heartbeat monitor is different from all other monitors — it's passive. Instead of Monitron checking your service, your service sends a "ping" to Monitron at regular intervals. If a ping isn't received within the expected timeframe, Monitron knows something is wrong.

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🎯 What It Does

• Listens for incoming HTTP pings from your services
• Each heartbeat monitor has a unique token URL
• If no ping is received within the interval + grace period, marks as Down
• Creates an incident automatically on failure

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🔗 How It Works

Your Service ──── HTTP GET/POST ────→ Monitron
                                       │
                   Every 5 minutes      │
                   (your schedule)      ├── Ping received? ✅ Up
                                       │
                   If no ping for       │
                   interval + grace ──→ ├── No ping? ❌ Down

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⚙️ Configuration

Setting	Description	Example
Name	What this heartbeat monitors	Nightly Backup
Label	Address field serves as a label	backup-cron
Check Interval	How often you expect a ping	5 minutes
Grace Period	Extra time before marking down	60 seconds

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🔗 Your Heartbeat URL

After creating a heartbeat monitor, Monitron generates a unique URL:

https://your-monitron.com/heartbeat/abc123def456

Send a GET or POST request to this URL from your service.

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📖 Usage Examples

See the Heartbeat Monitoring section for detailed integration examples with cron jobs, Laravel, Node.js, Python, and more.

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⚠️ Failure Endpoint

To explicitly report a failure, send a POST to:

https://your-monitron.com/heartbeat/abc123def456/fail

This immediately marks the monitor as Down and creates an incident, even if the regular interval hasn't expired yet.

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💡 Tips

• Always add a grace period! Network delays, slow cron starts, or slight timing variations can cause false alerts. A 60-second grace period handles this.
• Use the failure endpoint in your error handling:

  my-backup-script.sh || curl https://your-monitron.com/heartbeat/TOKEN/fail