Introducing Heartbeat Monitors: Active Health Checking in LogBlazer

Passive logging tells you what happened. Active monitoring tells you what is happening right now. Most teams start with logs — and that is the right call — but there is a gap between "the error was logged" and "we knew the service was down before users noticed." That gap is where heartbeat monitoring lives.

We just shipped Heartbeat Monitors in LogBlazer, and it fills that gap without adding complexity to your stack.

What Are Heartbeat Monitors?

A heartbeat monitor is a scheduled check that actively pings your endpoints, services, or URLs at a defined interval. If the check fails — or stops responding within the expected window — you know immediately. No waiting for a user to report a problem. No sifting through logs after the fact.

In LogBlazer, heartbeat monitors sit alongside your existing log streams. Each monitor runs its checks and surfaces results directly in your project dashboard. If a check fails, the error details are captured and populated automatically so you can see exactly what went wrong without switching tools.

How It Works in Practice

Each heartbeat monitor contains one or more checks, grouped into collapsible cards on your dashboard. The cards show humanized names for each check, expand by default so nothing is hidden, and persist their collapsed or expanded state in localStorage — so the view stays the way you left it.

When a heartbeat check runs, the result feeds into the same log table you already use. But heartbeat entries are excluded from your standard monitors section, keeping passive log monitoring and active health checking cleanly separated. Click any heartbeat card and the log table filters to show only that monitor's entries. Same interaction pattern as clicking a log source or level filter — consistent and predictable.

Heartbeat monitors also appear on public view dashboards. If you share a status page with your team or stakeholders, heartbeat health is right there next to your log-based monitors. One view, full picture.

Setting Up a Heartbeat Check

Once you have created a heartbeat monitor in your project, each check runs against an endpoint you define. Under the hood, it is an HTTP request on a schedule. Here is what a typical check looks like when it fires:

# Example: what a heartbeat check does behind the scenes curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \ --max-time 10 \ https://api.yourapp.com/health

# LogBlazer runs this on your configured schedule # and logs the result — pass or fail — to your project

You configure the URL, the interval, and the expected response. LogBlazer handles the scheduling, the logging, and the dashboard display. No cron jobs to manage, no external uptime service to wire up.

Key takeaway: Heartbeat monitors and log-based monitors share the same dashboard and the same log table. You get active health checking and passive log analysis in one place — no context switching, no extra tools.

Why This Matters

The best monitoring setups combine passive and active approaches. Logs capture the detail — stack traces, request payloads, timing data. Heartbeat checks capture the availability signal. Together, they give you both the "what happened" and the "is it still happening" without stitching together three different services.

LogBlazer has always been about keeping things simple: one endpoint, organized projects, searchable logs. Heartbeat monitors extend that philosophy. You configure your checks, they run on schedule, and the results show up in the same dashboard you already check every day. No new tool to learn, no separate alerting pipeline to maintain.

Get Started

Heartbeat monitors are available now in your LogBlazer dashboard. Add a monitor to any project, define your checks, and start getting active health signals alongside your logs. Here is what you get:

Scheduled endpoint checks that run automatically on your configured interval

Unified dashboard — heartbeat results live next to your log-based monitors

Clickable filtering — click a heartbeat card to see only that monitor's log entries

Public status pages — share heartbeat health with your team or stakeholders

Zero extra tooling — set up in about a minute, no external services required

If you are already using LogBlazer for logging, this is a natural next step. Same dashboard, same simplicity, more visibility.