All machines and software behind the operation of an online business are essential for it to keep online. Technology is great but not infallible. Different factors can affect its functioning, and monitoring like Heartbeat monitoring is the way to know if something is wrong.
What does Heartbeat monitoring mean?
Heartbeat (cron-job) monitoring is a useful method to check the health of devices. Simply talking, it allows you to send regular Cron Job events to a remote monitoring service. This way, you can check whether the system is online and whether its software is responding as expected.
Heartbeat monitoring will alert you if the rhythm of the heartbeats changes, if the heartbeats can not be sent or stop being sent, or if data sent with the Cron Job fail the parameters defined by the user. These situations could mean that the machine is offline, the software does not respond, so it’s in trouble, or other issues that you will have to diagnose and fix.
Heartbeat monitoring is also called Cron Job monitoring.
Heartbeat monitoring: Why do you need it?
You need Cron Job monitoring because, with it, you can:
- Check if your server is online. Having wrong settings, hardware failures, script errors, cyber attacks, etc., is not rare. The real issue is they can cause downtime. So, you want to detect them as soon as possible to solve them. Otherwise, if the downtime lasts long, users won’t be happy to receive a denial of access to your site, service, or application. Financial losses will come. You can not go blindly on these matters. You do need a monitoring system that can efficiently confirm the server’s uptime/downtime.
- Protect your brand’s image. For the clients, downtime means “not reliable” and a bad experience they will not try again. Heartbeat monitoring alerts you about something going wrong. This gives you time to prevent failure and downtime before it reaches your clients. Or if downtime is inevitable, at least you will not waste time ignoring the situation. You will focus your efforts on getting up your server.
- Forecast and prevent. Constant and efficient monitoring can generate an accurate “X-ray image” of your system’s functioning. It will produce valuable information, day after day, for you to make more accurate predictions and plan accordingly to prevent failures or events that can threaten your server’s uptime and its general health. An error, attack, or failure can surprise you once, but it won’t happen twice!
- Improve security. The use of heartbeat monitoring can show you failures that represent vulnerabilities in your system. Fixing them on time will improve your security.
- Monitor 24/7. You want your website accessible to clients 24/7. So your servers must be running smoothly at that pace. Heartbeat monitoring can monitor permanently and alert you at any time. No human will enjoy working following this rhythm, but heartbeat monitoring can.
Conclusion
Downtime can happen at any time, but Cron Job monitoring is a great ally to prevent it or to be ready to fix it as quickly as possible.