<p>In operations, most of the time no news is good news. If we’re not receiving alerts from monitoring systems about problems, we tend to assume that all is well with the world. But what if we’re not receiving alerts because some part of our monitoring solution has not been working for days or even weeks? If you’ve ever found out about a problem with the monitoring systems after being asked why there was no alert for a particular problem, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re supporting a web based application or service, chances are you’re employing a monitoring service to monitor the availability of your application from the outside, preferably from multiple locations. At OpsGenie we do take advantage of external services to monitor availability of OpsGenie web UI, as well as the <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/topics/495390-web-api/articles">API end points</a>. External web monitoring enables us to find out quickly when there is a problem with OpsGenie. In addition, OpsGenie has supported what we can “<a href="http://www.opsgenie.com/public/features/heartbeat.monitoring.html">heartbeat monitoring</a>" since the beginning. Heartbeat monitoring enables OpsGenie users to send OpsGenie periodic heartbeat messages. Heartbeat monitoring serves multiple purposes:</p><ul><li>Heartbeat requests are processed like any other API request, hence OpsGenie users can use heartbeat requests to monitor availability of the OpsGenie API.</li><li>If enabled, OpsGenie expects to receive the heartbeat messages and notifies the admins, if no message is received for over 10 minutes.</li></ul><p>Heartbeat monitoring helps OpsGenie users to detect various problems. Quite a few OpsGenie users have requested support for heartbeat messages from multiple sources. I’m happy to announce that heartbeat monitoring now supports multiple sources, enabling OpsGenie users to send heartbeat messages from multiple data centers, or monitoring tools. Heartbeat monitoring has a simple web API, hence can easily be integrated into any application, or can be called from the command line using utilities like curl. <a href="http://twitter.com/berkay">@berkay</a></p>![]()
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