Heartbeat monitors

Nov 06, 2026 | by openstatus | [monitoring]

Heartbeat monitors are now available in every workspace.

HTTP checks can't see a job that runs on its own schedule. A heartbeat monitor flips the direction: your job calls a unique ping URL each time it runs, and the monitor goes down when a ping doesn't arrive in time.

Pick Heartbeat when creating a monitor, set how often the job runs (period) and how late a ping may be (grace period), then add the ping to your job:

0 * * * * /path/to/job.sh && curl -fsS -m 10 --retry 3 https://api.openstatus.dev/heartbeat/<token>

• Missed pings: when the deadline passes, an incident opens and your notification channels are alerted. The next ping recovers the monitor and resolves the incident.
• Reported failures: ping the same URL followed by /fail to go down within a minute instead of waiting for the grace period.
• Ping logs: each ping shows up in the monitor's Logs tab. Send your job's error output as a POST body to keep the first 10 KB with the ping, with anything that looks like a secret redacted on a best-effort basis.
• Status pages: add a heartbeat monitor to a status page like any other monitor.

A new heartbeat monitor stays silent until its first ping, so you can create it before the job is deployed. Periods go from 1 minute to 30 days, and each heartbeat counts as one monitor on your plan.

You can also manage them through the API with CreateHeartbeatMonitor and UpdateHeartbeatMonitor.

Read the heartbeat monitor reference or the guide on what a cron heartbeat monitor is.