Glossary
Agent Heartbeat
A periodic signal transmitted by an agent to confirm operational status and connectivity, enabling detection of failures or disconnections.
What is Agent Heartbeat?
Heartbeats provide lightweight liveness monitoring, typically consisting of simple status messages sent at regular intervals. Absence of expected heartbeats triggers alerts and remediation workflows. Heartbeat frequency balances detection speed against network overhead, typically ranging from seconds to minutes.
Heartbeat monitoring is passive from the agent perspective, requiring minimal logic, making it robust even when agents are degraded. Aggregated heartbeat data provides availability metrics and identifies connectivity patterns.
Example
A payment processing agent sends a heartbeat message every 30 seconds to Signet's monitoring service, with a 2-minute silence triggering an alert to the operator and marking the agent unavailable.
How Signet addresses this
Signet uses heartbeat monitoring to track agent uptime and availability, feeding into reliability scores. The platform provides heartbeat infrastructure that agents can integrate via simple API calls.
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