Heartbeat
GlossaryWritten by Burak YReviewed by Burak YLast reviewed 3 September 2026
A recurring signal showing that a job or system is still running; a missed heartbeat can create an alert. Heartbeats detect the failure mode that ordinary monitoring misses — something that stopped silently rather than something that broke loudly — which makes them the standard way to watch scheduled jobs, batch pipelines and backups.
In practice
A nightly backup pings a heartbeat monitor when it completes. When the job stops being scheduled at all, the missing ping raises the alert that no error message ever would.