Dead man switch monitoring when silence is the incident
Classic checks ask whether a probe succeeded. Dead man switch monitoring asks whether anything checked in at all—and treats silence as the outage.
Why “green dashboards” still miss outages
Dashboards can keep loading while fresh signals stop. Agents die, alert webhooks break, or the scheduler that runs both the job and the check goes dark together. The scary failure mode is not a red page—it is a green-looking world with no new data.
What dead man switch monitoring actually checks
Your job (or your monitor) must periodically prove it is alive by sending a small heartbeat to an independent watcher. As long as heartbeats arrive inside a timeout window, nothing happens. When they stop, the watcher alerts you on a channel that should not share fate with the same box or alert pipeline.
Heartbeat vs classic uptime checks
Uptime checks typically ask “is this URL responding?” A heartbeat / dead-man pattern asks “did this process check in?”—which is better for cron, workers, and silent stalls that still look “up” from the outside. It does not replace APM; it answers one question well.
Minimal setup (probe → ping → Telegram)
- Create a probe and copy the Bearer token (shown once).
- Ping the heartbeat API on your schedule (curl, cron, or worker).
- If heartbeats stop, Telegram alerts fire within minutes.
When you still need APM (and when you don’t)
Use APM for latency, traces, and deep service maps. Use dead man switch monitoring when the risk is silence: cron that never starts, workers that stop looping, or a monitor that dies unnoticed. Many teams need both.
FAQ
What is dead man switch monitoring?
Dead man switch monitoring watches for missing check-ins. When the expected heartbeat stops, silence becomes the outage signal.
When should I use a dead man switch instead of uptime checks?
Use it when the risk is a quiet cron, worker, or monitor—not only whether a public URL returns 200. Uptime asks if a page responds; a dead man switch asks if anything checked in.
Does PulseGuard replace my existing uptime tool?
No. Keep classic uptime for public endpoints. Add PulseGuard Watchdog for heartbeat silence on jobs and schedulers.
How fast are alerts?
After heartbeats miss the timeout window, Telegram alerts aim to fire within minutes on the public trial.