[[heartbeat-developer-guide]]
= Heartbeat developer guide

[partintro]
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Heartbeat pings your remote services periodically and determines whether they
are available. As a developer, you can use Heartbeat in two different ways:

* Extend Heartbeat directly
* Create your own Beat and use Heartbeat as a library

We recommend that you start by creating your own Beat to keep the development of
your own monitors independent of Heartbeat. At a later stage, if you decide to
add a monitor to Heartbeat, you can reuse the code without making additional changes.

The following topics describe how to contribute to Heartbeat by adding new monitors
and new Beats based on Heartbeat:

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[[heartbeat-dev-overview]]
== Overview

Heartbeat consists of monitors that....

//TODO: Add developer guide content when Heartbeat is further along