Configuring Butler heartbeats

What’s this?

A tool like Butler should be viewed as mission critical, at least if it’s features are used by mission critical Sense apps.

But how can you know whether Butler itself is working?
Somehow Butler itself should be monitored.

Butler (and most other tools in the Butler family) has a heartbeat feature.
It sends periodic messages to a monitoring tool, which can then alert if Butler hasn’t checked in as expected.

Healthchecks.io is an example of such as tool. It’s open source but also a SaaS option if so preferred.

Uptime Kuma is another open source option that in addition to monitoring Butler itself can also monitor infrastructure components such as Sense servers, databases, source systems etc.

More info on using Healthchecks.io with Butler can be found in this blog post.

Settings in config file

---
Butler:
  ...
  ...
  # Heartbeats can be used to send "I'm alive" messages to any other tool, e.g. an infrastructure monitoring tool
  heartbeat:
    enable: false
    remoteURL: http://my.monitoring.server/some/path/
    frequency: every 30 seconds         # https://bunkat.github.io/later/parsers.html
  ...
  ...