What Is a Heartbeat Monitor?
A heartbeat monitor watches for a regular ping from a job or service and alerts when an expected ping fails to arrive within a grace window. Instead of testing that something is up, it detects the absence of an expected signal. It is the standard way to know a scheduled task did not run at all.
Why it matters
A failed cron job or stalled worker often produces no error to catch; it simply does nothing. A heartbeat monitor surfaces that silent failure, which is why it suits scheduled CI and batch jobs.
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