Heartbeats

What are heartbeats?

Heartbeats monitor things that should happen on a schedule — cron jobs, batch processes, backup scripts. Instead of ThunderHooks checking a URL, your job pings ThunderHooks. If the ping doesn't arrive on time, you get alerted.

How it works

1. Create a heartbeat monitor with an expected interval
2. ThunderHooks gives you a unique ping URL
3. Add a ping to the end of your cron job
4. If the ping stops arriving, ThunderHooks alerts you

Creating a heartbeat

Go to Monitoring > Heartbeats and click New Heartbeat:

• Name — what this job does (e.g. "Nightly DB Backup")
• Expected period — how often the ping should arrive, in seconds (e.g. 86400 for daily)
• Grace period — extra time before marking as missed (buffer for slow jobs)
• Alert after N misses — consecutive missed pings before alerting

Pinging

Add a simple HTTP request to the end of your script:

# At the end of your cron job
curl -s https://thunderhooks.com/ping/your-slug

Any HTTP method works — GET, POST, HEAD. The slug is unique to your heartbeat monitor.

You can also signal failure explicitly:

# If the job failed
curl -s https://thunderhooks.com/ping/your-slug/fail

Ping history

The heartbeat detail page shows all received pings with timestamps, source IPs, and any body content your script sent.

Alerts

Same alert options as monitors:

• Alert email — email notification on missed heartbeats
• Alert webhook URL — POST notification with failure details

Pause and resume

You can pause a heartbeat during maintenance windows. While paused, missed pings won't trigger alerts.