Heartbeat Monitoring

How It Works

Unlike HTTP monitors where Pong checks your service, heartbeat monitors work in reverse — your service pings Pong to say “I’m alive.”

If Pong doesn’t receive a ping within the configured interval, the monitor is marked as down and alerts fire.

Setup

1. Create a monitor with type Heartbeat
2. Set the interval (e.g. 5 minutes for a cron job that runs every 5 minutes)
3. Copy the generated ping URL

Pinging

Add the ping to the end of your cron job or task:

# Crontab example
*/5 * * * * /path/to/my-job.sh && curl -s https://api.getpong.dev/api/v1/heartbeat/YOUR_TOKEN

Both GET and POST are supported:

# GET
curl https://api.getpong.dev/api/v1/heartbeat/YOUR_TOKEN

# POST
curl -X POST https://api.getpong.dev/api/v1/heartbeat/YOUR_TOKEN

The ping endpoint is public — no authentication needed. The token itself is the secret.

Best Practices

• Ping after your job completes successfully, not before
• Set the interval slightly longer than your job’s schedule to account for execution time
• Use && to only ping on success: my-job.sh && curl ...