Heartbeat quick start: installation and configuration

This guide describes how to get started quickly collecting uptime data about your hosts. You’ll learn how to:

• install Heartbeat
• specify the protocols to monitor
• send uptime data to {es}
• visualize the uptime data in {kib}

You need Elasticsearch for storing and searching your data, and Kibana for visualizing and managing it.

Unlike most Beats, which you install on edge nodes, you typically install Heartbeat as part of a monitoring service that runs on a separate machine and possibly even outside of the network where the services that you want to monitor are running.

To download and install Heartbeat, use the commands that work with your system:

The commands shown are for AMD platforms, but ARM packages are also available. Refer to the download page for the full list of available packages.

• APT or YUM
• Download page
• Docker

Connections to Elasticsearch and Kibana are required to set up Heartbeat.

Set the connection information in heartbeat.yml. To locate this configuration file, see Directory layout.

cloud.id: "staging:dXMtZWFzdC0xLmF3cy5mb3VuZC5pbyRjZWM2ZjI2MWE3NGJmMjRjZTMzYmI4ODExYjg0Mjk0ZiRjNmMyY2E2ZDA0MjI0OWFmMGNjN2Q3YTllOTYyNTc0Mw=="
cloud.auth: "heartbeat_setup:{pwd}" 1

To learn more about required roles and privileges, see Grant users access to secured resources.

Heartbeat provides monitors to check the status of hosts at set intervals. Heartbeat currently provides monitors for ICMP, TCP, and HTTP (see Heartbeat overview for more about these monitors).

You configure each monitor individually. In heartbeat.yml, specify the list of monitors that you want to enable. Each item in the list begins with a dash (-). The following example configures Heartbeat to use three monitors: an icmp monitor, a tcp monitor, and an http monitor.

heartbeat.monitors:
- type: icmp
  schedule: '*/5 * * * * * *' 1
  hosts: ["myhost"]
  id: my-icmp-service
  name: My ICMP Service
- type: tcp
  schedule: '@every 5s' 2
  hosts: ["myhost:12345"]
  mode: any 3
  id: my-tcp-service
- type: http
  schedule: '@every 5s'
  urls: ["http://example.net"]
  service.name: apm-service-name 4
  id: my-http-service
  name: My HTTP Service

1. The icmp monitor is scheduled to run exactly every 5 seconds (10:00:00, 10:00:05, and so on). The schedule option uses a cron-like syntax based on this cronexpr implementation.
2. The tcp monitor is set to run every 5 seconds from the time when Heartbeat was started. Heartbeat adds the @every keyword to the syntax provided by the cronexpr package.
3. The mode specifies whether to ping one IP (any) or all resolvable IPs
4. The service.name field can be used to integrate heartbeat with elastic APM via the Uptime UI.

For more information about configuring Heartbeat, also see:

• Configure Heartbeat
• Config file format
• heartbeat.reference.yml: This reference configuration file shows all non-deprecated options. You’ll find it in the same location as heartbeat.yml.

Heartbeat can be deployed in multiple locations so that you can detect differences in availability and response times across those locations. Configure the Heartbeat location to allow Kibana to display location-specific information on Uptime maps and perform Uptime anomaly detection based on location.

To configure the location of a Heartbeat instance, modify the add_observer_metadata processor in heartbeat.yml. The following example specifies the geo.name of the add_observer_metadata processor as us-east-1a:

# ============================ Processors ============================

processors:
  - add_observer_metadata:
      # Optional, but recommended geo settings for the location Heartbeat is running in
      geo: 1
        # Token describing this location
        name: us-east-1a 2
        # Lat, Lon "
        #location: "37.926868, -78.024902" 3

1. Uncomment the geo setting.
2. Uncomment name and assign the name of the location of the Heartbeat server.
3. Optionally uncomment location and assign the latitude and longitude.

For more information about configuring Heartbeat, also see:

• Configure Heartbeat
• Config file format
• heartbeat.reference.yml: This reference configuration file shows all non-deprecated options. You’ll find it in the same location as heartbeat.yml.

Heartbeat comes with predefined assets for parsing, indexing, and visualizing your data. To load these assets:

1. Make sure the user specified in heartbeat.yml is authorized to set up Heartbeat.

2. From the installation directory, run:

heartbeat setup -e
```

heartbeat setup -e
```

./heartbeat setup -e
```

./heartbeat setup -e
```

PS > .\heartbeat.exe setup -e
```

sudo service heartbeat-elastic start

sudo service heartbeat-elastic start

sudo chown root heartbeat.yml 1
sudo ./heartbeat -e

sudo chown root heartbeat.yml 1
sudo ./heartbeat -e

PS C:\Program Files\heartbeat> Start-Service heartbeat

Heartbeat is now ready to check the status of your services and send events to your defined output.

Heartbeat comes with pre-built Kibana dashboards and UIs for visualizing the status of your services. The dashboards are available in the uptime-contrib GitHub repository.

If you loaded the dashboards earlier, open them now.

To open the dashboards:

1. Launch Kibana:

   <div class="tabs" data-tab-group="host">
   <div role="tablist" aria-label="Open Kibana">
   <button role="tab"
   aria-selected="true"
   aria-controls="cloud-tab-open-kibana"
   id="cloud-open-kibana">
   Elasticsearch Service
   </button>
   <button role="tab"
   aria-selected="false"
   aria-controls="self-managed-tab-open-kibana"
   id="self-managed-open-kibana"
   tabindex="-1">
   Self-managed
   </button>
   </div>
   <div tabindex="0"
   role="tabpanel"
   id="cloud-tab-open-kibana"
   aria-labelledby="cloud-open-kibana">

   1. Log in to your Elastic Cloud account.
   2. Navigate to the Kibana endpoint in your deployment.

   </div>
   <div tabindex="0"
   role="tabpanel"
   id="self-managed-tab-open-kibana"
   aria-labelledby="self-managed-open-kibana"
   hidden="">
   Point your browser to http://localhost:5601, replacing localhost with the name of the Kibana host.

   </div>
   </div>

2. In the side navigation, click Discover. To see Heartbeat data, make sure the predefined heartbeat-* data view is selected.

   Tip

   If you don’t see data in Kibana, try changing the time filter to a larger range. By default, Kibana shows the last 15 minutes.

3. In the side navigation, click Dashboard, then select the dashboard that you want to open.

The dashboards are provided as examples. We recommend that you customize them to meet your needs.

Now that you have your uptime data streaming into Elasticsearch, learn how to unify your logs, metrics, uptime, and application performance data.

1. Ingest data from other sources by installing and configuring other Elastic Beats:

   Elastic Beats	To capture
   Metricbeat	Infrastructure metrics
   Filebeat	Logs
   Winlogbeat	Windows event logs
   APM	Application performance metrics
   Auditbeat	Audit events

2. Use the Observability apps in Kibana to search across all your data:

   Elastic apps	Use to
   Metrics app	Explore metrics about systems and services across your ecosystem
   Logs app	Tail related log data in real time
   Uptime app	Monitor availability issues across your apps and services
   APM app	Monitor application performance
   SIEM app	Analyze security events