Heartbeats wait for confirmation

Next to the grace period a heartbeat now has Confirmations before alerting (1 to 5). At 1 we alert immediately on the first missed interval, exactly as before.

The default is 2 for intervals up to five minutes and 1 above that. The reason: confirmations times interval is your time to alert — on a daily backup two rounds would be two days.

Two cases still alert immediately, whatever you set: a ping to /fail, and a run that started but never reported finishing. Your script reports both itself, so nothing was lost in transit.

We have already set existing heartbeats with a short interval to 2. Their time to alert grows by one interval — if you do not want that, set the value to 1.

Open heartbeats

Until now a single missing ping was enough to flip a heartbeat to Down and notify you. On a job that runs every minute that meant: one request lost in transit becomes an incident — even though your job ran fine.

Now we count. Only when several intervals are missing in a row do we treat the service as down. Every incoming ping resets the counter: one hiccup in the morning and one in the afternoon do not add up.

Recovery stays immediate — the first ping that arrives again puts the service back to Up.