📖What it means

A regular signal saying a process is still alive. Its absence is the alarm — which is why a process that runs perfectly but emits nothing is indistinguishable from a dead one, and gets treated as dead.

📖Easily confused with

[{"term": "Wake", "distinction": "A heartbeat proves existence; a wake is an agent choosing to act."}, {"term": "Run record", "distinction": "A heartbeat says 'alive'; a run record says what was done and how it ended."}]

📖Also called

- liveness signal
- pulse
- still-alive ping

📖Filed under

Category: general.

Service: Process Monitoring.