💓 Heartbeat Monitor (dead man's switch)

Sends periodic HTTP GET pings to an external health-check URL. If kwatch stops or crashes, the external monitor stops receiving pings and pages you.

This is useful for detecting when kwatch itself is down — a "watch the watcher" pattern.

How it works

kwatch ── GET https://hc-ping.com/your-uuid ──► Healthchecks.io
         (every 300 seconds)

If kwatch crashes:
  Healthchecks.io stops receiving pings
  After grace period → sends you an alert (email, SMS, etc.)

Configuration

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
heartbeatMonitor.enabled	bool	false	Enable heartbeat pings.
heartbeatMonitor.interval	int (sec)	300	Seconds between pings (min: 1).
heartbeatMonitor.url	string	""	External URL to ping (e.g. https://hc-ping.com/your-uuid).

Example with Healthchecks.io

Healthchecks.io is a free dead-man's switch service.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  name: kwatch
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: kwatch
  namespace: kwatch
data:
  config.yaml: |
    heartbeatMonitor:
      enabled: true
      interval: 300
      url: "https://hc-ping.com/your-uuid-here"

1. Sign up at Healthchecks.io
2. Create a new check
3. Copy the ping URL
4. Configure kwatch as shown above
5. In Healthchecks.io, set the grace period (e.g. 10 minutes)

Example with Better Uptime

heartbeatMonitor:
  enabled: true
  interval: 60
  url: "https://betteruptime.com/api/v1/heartbeat/your-heartbeat-key"