Uptime monitoring tells you when your server goes down. But some of the worst outages look like this:

The server is fine

The cron scheduler fired

Nothing visibly broke

The job just quietly stopped doing anything useful.

A nightly data sync that hasn't run in four days. A backup that "completed" but wrote zero bytes. A report job that started silently throwing exceptions three weeks ago. These failures are invisible to a traditional HTTP monitor because the endpoint

never went down.

This is what heartbeat monitoring solves.

How it works

A heartbeat monitor is a dead-man's switch. Instead of Tickstem polling your endpoint, your job calls Tickstem at the end of every successful run. If the ping stops arriving within the expected interval + grace window, you get an alert.

You configure two things:

interval — how often you expect a ping (e.g. every 24h)

grace window — buffer past the deadline before alerting (e.g.…