A systems administrator is fine-tuning the enterprise monitoring platform for a critical file server. The tool already generates performance alerts when CPU or memory crosses static thresholds, and log-based rules notify the team of disk or service errors. Last week the server froze completely and stopped sending any metrics; because no new data arrived, none of the existing rules fired and the outage went unnoticed for 20 minutes. The administrator now wants to receive a notification if the monitoring tool loses contact with the host for more than 60 seconds, even when no other counters change. Which type of alerting mechanism should the administrator configure to achieve this goal?
Configure a heartbeat (liveness) alert that triggers when the monitoring agent misses a scheduled check-in.
Define a static CPU-utilization threshold that alarms when usage exceeds 95 %.
Implement a synthetic transaction alert that simulates a user file transfer every five minutes.
Create a log-based alert that fires on new critical events written to the Windows System log.
A heartbeat (also called a liveness) alert is triggered when the monitoring platform fails to receive the regular "I am alive" signal that an agent or host sends at fixed intervals. This makes it ideal for detecting total system hangs or network isolation, where no metrics or logs are being collected at all. Static CPU-utilization thresholds require current performance data to evaluate, so they cannot fire if the server stops reporting. Log-based alerts depend on new event-log entries and likewise remain silent when logging ceases. Synthetic-transaction alerts proactively test application functionality, but they are designed to validate an end-user workflow rather than simply verify that the host is still communicating with the monitoring engine. Therefore, configuring a heartbeat alert is the correct solution.
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