39 lines
1.8 KiB
Text
39 lines
1.8 KiB
Text
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[[heartbeat-overview]]
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== Heartbeat overview
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++++
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<titleabbrev>Overview</titleabbrev>
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++++
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Heartbeat is a lightweight daemon that you install on a remote server
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to periodically check the status of your services and determine whether they are
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available. Unlike {metricbeat}/index.html[Metricbeat], which only tells you if
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your servers are up or down, Heartbeat tells you whether your services are
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reachable.
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Heartbeat is useful when you need to verify that you're meeting your service
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level agreements for service uptime. It's also useful for other scenarios, such
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as security use cases, when you need to verify that no one from the outside can
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access services on your private enterprise server.
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You can configure Heartbeat to ping all DNS-resolvable IP addresses for a
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specified hostname. That way, you can check all services that are load-balanced
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to see if they are available.
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When you configure Heartbeat, you specify monitors that identify the
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hostnames that you want to check. Each monitor runs based on the schedule that
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you specify. For example, you can configure one monitor to run every 10
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minutes, and a different monitor to run between the hours of 9:00 and 17:00.
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Heartbeat currently supports monitors for checking hosts via:
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* ICMP (v4 and v6) Echo Requests. Use the `icmp` monitor when you simply want to
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check whether a service is available. This monitor requires root access.
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* TCP. Use the `tcp` monitor to connect via TCP. You can optionally configure this
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monitor to verify the endpoint by sending and/or receiving a custom payload.
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* HTTP. Use the `http` monitor to connect via HTTP. You can optionally configure
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this monitor to verify that the service returns the expected response, such as a
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specific status code, response header, or content.
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The `tcp` and `http` monitors both support SSL/TLS and some proxy settings.
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