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Passive vs Active Monitoring

Understanding the difference between Heartbeats (we wait for you) and HTTP Checks (we check you) is key to setting up effective monitoring.

💓 Heartbeat Monitors

Passive Check

Heartbeats are a "Dead Man's Switch" for your background jobs. OpsPulse waits for your signal. If the signal doesn't arrive by the expected time (+ grace period), we trigger an alert.

Your Server / Script
Cron Job, Backup
HTTPS Request
GET / POST / HEAD
OpsPulse
Cloud

💡 Key Concept: Grace Period

Sometimes jobs run a little late. The Grace Period is a buffer zone.

Example: Your backup runs every hour. Sometimes it takes 5 extra minutes due to load. Set a Grace Period of 10 minutes. We won't alert you unless it's really stuck.

Technical Details

  • ✓Supports GET, POST, HEAD requests.
  • ✓Payloads (JSON) are logged for debugging.
  • ✓Perfect for backups, cron jobs, and worker health.

⚡ HTTP Monitors

Active Check

The classic Uptime Monitor. OpsPulse sends requests to your service from the cloud to ensure it's accessible and responsive.

OpsPulse Workers
AWS Lambda
Checks status
Every X minutes
Your Website
API, Landing Page

Global & Detailed

We don't just "ping" you. We perform a full health check using AWS Lambda.

  • ✓Status Codes: Must be 2xx (or configurable).
  • ✓Latency: Track response times over time.
  • ✓SSL Validity: (Coming Soon) Check certificate expiry.

Why Distributed?

OpsPulse uses a distributed worker system. Even if our main dashboard has a hiccup, our isolated worker fleet continues to check your services from independent cloud environments.

🔔 Then What Happens?

When a monitor turns DOWN, you shouldn't have to be staring at a dashboard.

Email Alerts
We instantly email you details about the failure.
Webhooks
We POST a JSON payload to your PagerDuty, Slack, or Discord.
Recovery
We notify you again as soon as the service recovers.
Create HeartbeatCreate HTTP Check