What’s a Heartbeat and why you need it

A Heartbeat is like a “pulse” signal your server sends to erty at regular intervals.

If the signal stops… it means something’s wrong (and we’ll let you know right away).

In short, it helps you:

  • Monitor cronjobs or scheduled scripts.
  • Know if they’ve stalled or stopped running.
  • Avoid nasty surprises, like stuck processes nobody noticed.

💡 What’s a cronjob?
It’s an automated task your server runs at specific times (for example: “update the database every hour” or “send the report every night”). Heartbeat checks that these tasks are actually running as expected.

 

How to create a new Heartbeat

  1. Go to the Heartbeats section from the left menu.
  2. Click Create heartbeat.
  3. Fill in the main fields:
    • Name: the monitor name (e.g. “Nightly backup”).
    • Expect a heartbeat every: how often you expect the signal (you can choose seconds, minutes, hours, or days).
    • Grace period: a tolerance margin before triggering the alert (e.g. if your cronjob runs every hour, you might allow 5 minutes of grace).
  4. Notifications: choose how you want to get alerts (email, Slack, SMS, etc.). (Each customer will only see the channels they’ve set up — we’ll have a dedicated guide for this)
  5. Advanced settings (extra options): 
    • Email reports: enable this to receive periodic uptime reports for your Heartbeat via email.
    • Project: assign the Heartbeat to a project to keep your monitors organized.
  6. Click Create.

 

How it works (and linking it to your cronjob)

Once it’s created:

  • erty will give you a unique link (something like https://app.erty.pro/webhook-heartbeat/your-unique-id).
  • In your cronjob, just add a command to send a GET or POST request to that link every time the job runs.
  • If erty doesn’t receive the signal within the set time + the grace period, an alert will be triggered.
💡 Example with cURL in a cronjob
* * * * * curl -m 10 -s https://app.erty.pro/webhook-heartbeat/your-unique-id > /dev/null 2>&1

This sends a “pulse” to erty every minute.

 

Pro tips

  • Set a realistic grace period: too short = false alarms, too long = delayed alerts.
  • Use projects to organize your monitors if you have many.
  • Want to know more about notification options? Check our dedicated erty Notifications guide (link coming soon).