Alert timeouts, heartbeats and Housekeeping

In this tutorial, you will learn how and why to set timeout values for alerts, how heartbeats can be used to verify system health and what housekeeping tasks need to be configured to support both of these features.



Alert timeout values can be used to automatically “expire” alerts that are no longer active. Timeouts can be used for any type of alert but are most useful for alerts which do not have a corresponding “clear” or “ok” state, such as syslog messages. Timeouts are set on a per-alert basis.

Heartbeats can be sent from any source or by a proxy on behalf of any source. They are sent at regular intervals within a specified timeout period otherwise they are considered to be stale. Stale heartbeats can be used to generate alerts or availability reports.

Processing alert and heartbeat timeouts requires a scheduled cron job.


It is assumed that you have completed Tutorial 1 where you installed and configured a basic Alerta instance or you have access to a similarly configured Alerta server.

Step 1: Housekeeping

To work with alert timeouts you first need to setup a regular housekeeping job that runs every minute to expire and delete alerts. The alerta command-line client supports this:

$ alerta housekeeping

Add the cron entry to run every minute as root (the root user is used to keep the tutorial simple however there is nothing about what the script does that actually requires root access):

$ echo "* * * * * root /usr/bin/alerta housekeeping" >/etc/cron.d/alerta


Your path to the alerta command-line tool may be different. Check the path with $ which alerta

Step 2: Alert Timeouts

The default timeout period for an alert is 86400 seconds, or one day. This means that one day after the alert is last received it should be considered to be stale and the status changed to “expired”.


The alert lastReceiveTime is used to determine alert expiry. This is so that alerts that continue to be sent within the timeout period will never expire.

In addition to expiring timed-out alerts, the script in step 1 is also responsible for deleting “closed” or “expired” alerts more than 2 hours old and deleting alerts with severity “informational” that are more than 12 hours old.

Both of these actions can be changed to suit your environment, either by adjusting the thresholds for deletion or not deleting at all.

Send a test alert with a short timeout period and verify that once the timeout period has been exceeded the status is changed to “expired”:

$ alerta send -r user01 -e fail -s major -E Code -S Security \
-t 'user01 login failed.' --timeout 20

Step 3: Heartbeats

Heartbeats can be sent to the Alerta API using the command-line tool, for example:

$ alerta heartbeat --origin dc1-oem-01 --timeout 60

To generate alerts from stale heartbeats run:

$ alerta heartbeats --alert

To set the environment or group for a heartbeat alert use tags:

$ alerta heartbeat -O dc1-oem-02 -T environment:Development -T group:Network

Add the above command as a cron job so that alerts are generated whenever a heartbeat is stale or slow:

$ echo "* * * * * root /usr/local/bin/alerta heartbeats --alert" >>/etc/cron.d/alerta

Next Steps

After you setup your housekeeping jobs, you might want to try some of the following tutorials:

  • Configure a plugin to notify a Slack Channel
  • Send alerts to the Alerta API using the command-line tool
  • Create filtered alert views for different customers