A heartbeat monitor for software as a service

Nice article on how heartbeats are used. I would like to know more about the technical implementation. Do they send heartbeats via HTTP Post? Email? Some other mechanism?<p>What monitors the heartbeat server to make sure it is up and running as expected?

Nice article, I would be curious how it is implemented and how you setup the rules for alerting.<p>I'm working with Microsoft's Semantic Logging Application Block to standardize error logging and auditing across all my .NET apps. It utilizes the built-in Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) to capture events written by any application, and writes them to a destination of your choice (db, file, etc). .NET 4.5 includes a new EventSource class that I inherit from, and simply call WriteEvent() and the message goes off to ETW. Reference: <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/agile/archive/2013/02/07/embracing-semantic-logging.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.msdn.com/b/agile/archive/2013/02/07/embracing-s...</a><p>I would like to add heartbeats to my design, in addition to just error logging, tracing and http auditing.

Awesome to see a South African company on the front page of HN. Keep it up, guys! Just two questions though - how have you secured the heartbeat? An attacker could take down your servers and forge a heartbeat. How do you prevent that?

Can't this be piggy-backed on syslog collection? If you have centralized syslog and a facility for heartbeats, you could post-process these heartbeats when log parsing your "heartbeats" log while only using up resources on your parsing machine. Syslog-ng provides tcp logging.

something like this <a href="http://www.pushmon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pushmon.com/</a> ??