Common monitor optionsedit

You can specify the following options when defining a Heartbeat monitor in any location. These options are the same for all monitors. Each monitor type has additional configuration options that are specific to that monitor type.

typeedit

The type of monitor to run. See Monitor types.

idedit

A unique identifier for this configuration. This should not change with edits to the monitor configuration regardless of changes to any config fields. Examples: uploader-service, http://example.net, us-west-loadbalancer. Note that this uniqueness is only within a given beat instance. If you want to monitor the same endpoint from multiple locations it is recommended that those heartbeat instances use the same IDs so that their results can be correlated. You can use the host.geo.name property to disambiguate them.

When querying against indexed monitor data this is the field you will be aggregating with. Appears in the exported fields as monitor.id.

If you do not set this explicitly the monitor’s config will be hashed and a generated value used. This value will change with any options change to this monitor making aggregations over time between changes impossible. For this reason it is recommended that you set this manually.

nameedit

Optional human readable name for this monitor. This value appears in the exported fields as monitor.name.

enablededit

A Boolean value that specifies whether the module is enabled. If the enabled option is missing from the configuration block, the module is enabled by default.

scheduleedit

A cron-like expression that specifies the task schedule. For example:

  • */5 * * * * * * runs the task every 5 seconds (for example, at 10:00:00, 10:00:05, and so on).
  • @every 5s runs the task every 5 seconds from the time when Heartbeat was started.

The schedule option uses a cron-like syntax based on this cronexpr implementation, but adds the @every keyword.

For stats on the execution of scheduled tasks you can enable the HTTP stats server with http.enabled: true in heartbeat.yml, then run curl http://localhost:5066/stats | jq .heartbeat.scheduler to view the scheduler’s stats. Stats are provided for both jobs and tasks. Each time a monitor is scheduled is considered to be a single job, while portions of the work a job does, like DNS lookups and executing network requests are defined as tasks. The stats provided are:

  • jobs.active: The number of actively running jobs/monitors.
  • jobs.missed_deadline: The number of jobs that executed after their scheduled time. This can be caused either by overlong long timeouts from the previous job or high load preventing heartbeat from keeping up with work.
  • tasks.active: The number of tasks currently running.
  • tasks.waiting: If the global schedule.limit option is set, this number will reflect the number of tasks that are ready to execute, but have not been started in order to prevent exceeding schedule.limit.

Also see the task scheduler settings.

ipv4edit

A Boolean value that specifies whether to ping using the ipv4 protocol if hostnames are configured. The default is true.

ipv6edit

A Boolean value that specifies whether to ping using the ipv6 protocol if hostnames are configured. The default is true.

modeedit

If mode is any, the monitor pings only one IP address for a hostname. If mode is all, the monitor pings all resolvable IPs for a hostname. The mode: all setting is useful if you are using a DNS-load balancer and want to ping every IP address for the specified hostname. The default is any.

timeoutedit

The total running time for each ping test. This is the total time allowed for testing the connection and exchanging data. The default is 16 seconds (16s).

If the timeout is exceeded, Heartbeat publishes a service-down event. If the value specified for timeout is greater than schedule, intermediate checks will not be executed by the scheduler.

fieldsedit

Optional fields that you can specify to add additional information to the output. For example, you might add fields that you can use for filtering log data. Fields can be scalar values, arrays, dictionaries, or any nested combination of these. By default, the fields that you specify here will be grouped under a fields sub-dictionary in the output document. To store the custom fields as top-level fields, set the fields_under_root option to true. If a duplicate field is declared in the general configuration, then its value will be overwritten by the value declared here.

fields_under_rootedit

If this option is set to true, the custom fields are stored as top-level fields in the output document instead of being grouped under a fields sub-dictionary. If the custom field names conflict with other field names added by Heartbeat, then the custom fields overwrite the other fields.

tagsedit

A list of tags that will be sent with the monitor event. This setting is optional.

processorsedit

A list of processors to apply to the data generated by the monitor.

See Processors for information about specifying processors in your config.

keep_nulledit

If this option is set to true, fields with null values will be published in the output document. By default, keep_null is set to false.