Heartbeats

AppSignal heartbeats give you visibility into the state of background processes such as Cron Jobs. AppSignal Heartbeats help answer questions like:

• ✅ Did my cron job run?
• ✅ Did my cron job fail?
• ✅ Are my cron jobs running as scheduled?

Once configured, AppSignal will track background processes, giving you insights into individual runs and notifying you if a process doesn't notify us of completion.

This documentation will run you through:

• The Heartbeats process
• Heartbeats setup steps

Heartbeats process

Heartbeats help you monitor jobs by telling AppSignal when a job starts and ends.

In AppSignal you define the cron schedule of the processes you wish to monitor and what the maximal desired runtime for the process is, for example, an hourly job with a maximal run-time of 30 minutes.

AppSignal then uses your job's cron schedule and creates occurrences for when each job is scheduled to run. Heartbeats communicates to AppSignal when a job's occurrence has started and finished.

AppSignal is then able to notify you if Heartbeats are not received for a job, or if it exceeds the desired runtime on an occurrence level, helping you ensure vital background processes are being reliably executed.

Heartbeats setup steps

1. Create a Heartbeat in AppSignal
2. Send Heartbeats from your background job to AppSignal:
   • Send Heartbeats via API
   • Send Heartbeats via AppSignal Integrations
3. Monitor Heartbeat Occurrences in AppSignal

Additional resources

To help you understand cron/crontab syntax and Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) we recommend reading the following AppSignal Learning Center articles:

• Why should my app and server use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)?
• How can I use the cron syntax to schedule cron jobs?