Sunday, March 09, 2014

OCTPW: Heartbeat

Heartbeat is a simple way to check a process's vital signs.  Use it instead of Monit, Pingdom, Uptime Robot, or any combination thereof.

There's no setup.  Just open up a terminal and type:

    curl http://heartbeat.alexose.com/your-email@example.com/60
 
This will create a new heartbeat that will alert "your-email@example.com" in 60 seconds.  You can postpone this alert by running the same command again, or you can stop it altogether by sending a cancellation:

    curl http://heartbeat.alexose.com/your-email@example.com/cancel

The most straightforward use case is for keeping tabs on sensor data, but I can imagine using it wherever downtime requires your attention.  I use it to monitor several Raspberry Pis (which I use for all sorts of things around the house).

Check out the README for the full documentation and more usage examples.

No comments: