No, we are not kidding. The applications we develop can now optionally have a heartbeat. This isn’t some new age hippie zen thing to get in touch with your program. Our programs don’t really have a heart. ‘Heartbeat,’ in this case, means programs that we write can now be setup to regularly send out a signal to show that they are still running properly.
We developed a set of tools that listen for those signals just like a doctor might listen to your heart.
The ‘Heartbeat Monitor’ can be configured to take several different actions when a monitored program fails to signal or signal correctly. Specifically, the monitor can:
- log an event
- allow several failures before acting
- notify ICAL staff by text or email
- restart a program that has failed
- do nothing
There are both commercial and open source tools that do similar things, but they are more focused on data center management, not application monitoring. Most provide a lot of abilities we don’t need, and each lacked a few features that make it easier to watch our monitored applications.
The monitor program and the tools that were needed for each program to talk to it were developed over a year. We began of defining a simple protocol in 2014. In June of 2015, we started testing the process on some of our existing hosted applications.
For ICAL, this means we can can maintain more applications with less resources. For customers, we can keep our costs lower while providing better service. We don’t have to pay people to check things 24 hours a day. We do have programs that can.
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Happy Computing!
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