heartbeat

Heartbeat is a super simple and minimalistic plugin-based monitoring and notification tool. Heartbeat comes with a handful of monitoring and notification plugins and provides a simple API for developing your own.

Heartbeat is intended to be highly flexible and adaptable to suit various applications. The core of Heartbeat is designed for asynchronous routing of information from producers (which can be anything) to handlers (which can also be anything). Heartbeat can be used for anything from monitoring a fleet of servers to developing an IoT system. The PubSub architecture in Heartbeat allows the same Heartbeat community to send information to both humans and other computers, without stepping on each others' toes.

Heartbeat is not designed with huge-scale systems in mind. Although Heartbeat can, in theory, handle such situations, it has not been tested that way. Heartbeat provides basic security for encrypting data in transit over a network, but has not been tested for security thoroughly; use Heartbeat at your own risk.

Usage

Heartbeat supports Linux and Linux-like operating systems running Python 3.3 and newer. Support for Windows is in progress, but is still experimental.

Installation

Heartbeat can be installed directly through Python using the provided setup.py file in the repository. Installing Heartbeat through this requires setuptools to be installed but should otherwise work on any platform Python is able to run on. Once the repository is cloned to a local location, you can install Heartbeat by running python setup.py install

For ArchLinux users, a pkgbuild is available in the repository for those interested in building their own package, and a pre-built package installable with pacman is provided with each release. Some manual intervention may be required to install Heartbeat's requirements, as some are not available in the AUR or Arch repositories. You can install a pre-built package by running sudo pacman -U heartbeat-<your_version>.pkg.xz.

For Windows users, an experimental installer generated using setuptools is provided with most releases. This installer will not install Heartbeat's dependencies, so manual intervention is required. All of Heartbeat's dependencies are available through pip.

After installing, you will need to use the Heartbeat helper script to install at a minimum, Heartbeat's base configuration files, and service files if desired. Run heartbeat-install --install-cfg, and heartbeat-install --help to see more options.

For more information about installing and configuring Heartbeat, visit the Wiki: installation and configuration.

Using Heartbeat

Heartbeat should be configured prior to use. See the configuration information and list of provided plugins

On all platforms, Heartbeat can be started manually by issuing the command startheart. Depending on your needs and the plugins you're using, you may need to grant Heartbeat root access.

On Linux systems using systemd or sysvinit, Heartbeat can be run as a service. Service files and initscripts are provided in the repository in dist/_lib and dist/_etc respectively. If you install using the provided ArchLinux package or a conversion of it to another package manager's format, the systemd service file will be automatically installed. Currently, no service definitions are provided for other init systems or operating systems but pull requests are welcome.

Developing Plugins

Heartbeat is based around plugins to provide additional services to suit your needs. Plugins can be producers, subcribers, or both. Heartbeat ships with a small collection of plugins based on monitoring servers, which you can use as examples for building your own.

More documentation is provided in the Wiki.

License

Included software is distributed under the BSD 3-clause license. See LICENSE for full license text.