Uptime monitoring tells you when your server goes down. But some of the worst outages look like this: The server is fine The cron scheduler fired Nothing visibly broke The job just quietly stopped doing anything useful. A nightly data sync that hasn't run in four days. A backup that "completed" but wrote zero bytes. A report job that started silently throwing exceptions three weeks ago. These failures are invisible to a traditional HTTP monitor because the endpoint never went down. This is what heartbeat monitoring solves. How it works A heartbeat monitor is a dead-man's switch. Instead of Tickstem polling your endpoint, your job calls Tickstem at the end of every successful run. If the ping stops arriving within the expected interval + grace window, you get an alert. You configure two things: interval — how often you expect a ping (e.g. every 24h) grace window — buffer past the deadline before alerting (e.g. 1h) No ping for two consecutive intervals → alert sent.…