Configuring Butler SOS heartbeats

What’s this?

A tool like Butler SOS should be viewed as mission critical, at least if it’s features are used by mission critical Sense apps.

But how can you know whether Butler SOS itself is working?
Somehow Butler SOS itself should be monitored.

Butler SOS (and most other tools in the Butler family) has a heartbeat feature.
It sends periodic messages to a monitoring tool, which can then alert if Butler SOS hasn’t checked in as expected.

Healthchecks.io is an example of such as tool. It’s open source but also has a SaaS option if so preferred.

More info on using Healthchecks.io with Butler (Butler SOS works the same way) can be found in this blog post.

Settings in main config file

Butler-SOS:
  ...
  ...
  # Heartbeats can be used to send "I'm alive" messages to some other tool, e.g. an infrastructure monitoring tool
  # The concept is simple: The remoteURL will be called at the specified frequency. The receiving tool will then know 
  # that Butler SOS is alive.
  heartbeat:
    enable: false
    remoteURL: http://my.monitoring.server/some/path/
    frequency: every 1 hour         # https://bunkat.github.io/later/parsers.html#text
  ...
  ...