Agent heartbeat and status tracking

Long-running agents do not fail loudly—they drift, hang, or lose credentials while still looking “fine” in a local terminal. Heartbeat monitoring exists so Dailybot can answer a simple ops question: is this agent still alive and honest about its state? This article is the product-oriented explanation of that system: what heartbeats are, how status is computed, how to configure intervals, what happens when pings stop, and how dashboards make the signal visible across a fleet.

This is distinct from generic “template” guidance you might have seen in earlier onboarding: here we focus on Dailybot’s feature behavior and how it fits real production habits.

What heartbeats are

A heartbeat is a lightweight, periodic signal sent by an agent integration or its supervisor process. It might be a bare timestamp (“I am still running”) or include structured hints: current task, queue depth, last successful commit, or environment label. The payload depth depends on your setup; the essential contract is regular proof of life tied to a known agent identity.

Heartbeats complement narrative reports. A standup-style update explains what happened; a heartbeat proves the process reporting is still connected and within expected bounds. Together they reduce false confidence from agents that stopped mid-run but never sent a final message.

How Dailybot tracks status

Dailybot aggregates heartbeats into status labels you can scan on the dashboard or fleet view. While exact naming may evolve, the mental model is:

Active — heartbeats arrive on schedule and optional activity matches “working.”

Idle — the agent is reachable but quiet, which may be normal between tasks.

Stale — the interval elapsed without a heartbeat, suggesting a stuck worker, network partition, or crashed runner.

Offline — the agent is disabled, deregistered, or has failed authentication repeatedly.

Status is derived, not manually toggled: it reflects time since last good signal versus the policy you set. That keeps ops and developers aligned on the same truth without someone editing a spreadsheet of “who is up.”

Configuring heartbeat intervals

Intervals should match how critical the agent is and how quickly you need to detect failure. A nightly batch job might heartbeat every thirty minutes; a customer-facing automation might ping every few minutes during business hours.

When choosing an interval, balance detection speed against noise. Too aggressive, and flaky networks page people; too loose, and you discover outages late. Dailybot lets workspace admins set defaults while allowing overrides per agent group or environment—mirror your staging versus production expectations so tests do not train the team to ignore alerts.

Document the chosen interval beside runbooks: future teammates should know whether five minutes of silence is “grab coffee” or “page someone.”

When heartbeats stop: alerts and escalation

Missing heartbeats are not always catastrophes—laptops sleep, containers restart—but they should never be invisible. Dailybot can:

Raise alerts in-channel or via integrations so the right room sees degradation quickly.

Mark the agent stale or offline in the UI, which helps managers and dev leads during incidents or release windows.

Trigger escalation paths when policy demands human verification—for example, if a release agent stops heartbeating during a deploy window.

Chaining heartbeat loss to escalation prevents the worst case: everyone assumes the agent finished work when it actually vanished mid-task.

Viewing status on the dashboard

The dashboard rolls heartbeat-derived status into cards, tables, or filters so you do not inspect each integration individually. Ops often watches fleet-level green/red during incidents; developers filter to their project agents before a demo day.

Use the dashboard as a daily hygiene surface, not only during fires. Teams that glance once per standup catch drifting credentials and quota issues while they are still cheap to fix.

Heartbeat versus templates and playbooks

Templates teach what to ask agents in standups or check-ins. Heartbeat and status tracking teach the platform whether the agent is still there to answer. Both belong in a mature setup: templates drive qualitative updates; heartbeats enforce quantitative liveness. If you only have templates, you can still get rich text from a ghost process; if you only have heartbeats, you know uptime but not progress. Dailybot combines them so automated teammates stay accountable the way human teammates expect to be—visible, on schedule, and honest when they go quiet.