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Overview

Heartbeats are periodic signals sent by your systems or applications to indicate they are functioning properly. In the event of a missed heartbeat, Rootly will trigger an alert, allowing you to proactively address potential issues before they escalate into incidents. This feature helps ensure continuous monitoring and quick detection of system failures, enhancing overall reliability.

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Configuring Heartbeats

To create a new heartbeat in the web app:
  1. Navigate to On-Call tab —> Heartbeats Tab and click + New Heartbeat.
  2. Give your new Heartbeat a Name (required)
  3. Provide a Description (optional)
  4. Select Who do you want to page?
    • You can choose from Escalation Policies, Services, Teams, or Users.
  5. Add an Alert Summary
    • This will appear as the alert summary when your alert is created.
  6. Select an Alert Urgency (recommended)
  7. Set an Expected Ping Interval
    • This will determine how often Rootly will expect a ping for this heartbeat.
  8. Once completed click Create Heartbeat

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Pinging Heartbeats

Rootly provides multiple ways to ping your heartbeats to confirm they’re functioning properly:

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HTTP API Pinging

You can send HTTP requests to ping your heartbeat using the following endpoint: 
curl -X POST https://api.rootly.com/v1/heartbeats/{heartbeat_id}/ping
Replace {heartbeat_id} with your actual heartbeat ID.

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Email-based Pinging

Each heartbeat automatically generates a unique email address that you can use to ping via email. This is particularly useful for systems that can send emails but may have difficulty making HTTP requests. How it works:
  • Every heartbeat gets a unique email address in the format: heartbeat-{uuid}@email.rootly.com
  • Simply send any email to this address to ping the heartbeat
  • The email subject and content don’t matter - any email sent to this address will register as a ping
  • If you send an email to an invalid heartbeat address, you’ll receive a bounce notification
Finding your heartbeat email address:
  1. Navigate to your heartbeat’s configuration page
  2. Copy the email address from the “Email Address” field
  3. Use this email address in your monitoring scripts, cron jobs, or automated systems
Example use cases:
  • Cron jobs that send status emails
  • Database backup scripts that email completion reports
  • Automated systems that already have email notification capabilities
  • Legacy systems where HTTP requests are difficult to implement
Both HTTP and email pinging methods work identically - they will reset the heartbeat timer and resolve any existing alerts if the heartbeat was previously in a failed state.