Install heartbeat with Homebrew, apt, Nix, winget

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• heartbeat

Project history

Heartbeat belongs to Elastic Beats, a family of lightweight Go data shippers for Elasticsearch and Logstash. The Beats repository was created in 2014, and Heartbeat later joined Filebeat, Metricbeat, Packetbeat, Winlogbeat, and related Beats as the service-availability member of that family.

Elastic's November 2018 announcement says Heartbeat was introduced in beta in January 2017 and reached general availability with Elastic Stack 6.5. The same post presents Heartbeat as a lightweight shipper designed for uptime monitoring, configured by a list of URLs or endpoints to check and report to Elasticsearch.

The Heartbeat reference describes the core model: install a lightweight daemon on a remote server, define monitors, schedule checks, and send events about whether services are reachable. Over time, Heartbeat became tied to Kibana's Uptime experience and later to Elastic's broader observability and synthetic-monitoring story.

Adoption history

Heartbeat adoption followed Elastic Stack operators who wanted uptime data in the same Elasticsearch and Kibana environment as logs, metrics, packet data, and APM traces. The launch article emphasizes combining Heartbeat with Metricbeat, Filebeat, and APM to triage outages from one operational data store.

The official product page positions Heartbeat for testing services from inside or outside a network, pinging ICMP, TCP, and HTTP targets, using TLS, authentication, proxies, and dynamically loaded monitor definitions. That made it useful for infrastructure teams already standardized on Elastic ingestion and dashboards.

Elastic later moved many ingestion workflows toward Elastic Agent and Synthetic Monitoring, but the traditional Heartbeat binary and heartbeat.yml workflow remain documented for lightweight TCP, HTTP, and ICMP monitors configured by operators.

How it is used

Operators configure `heartbeat.yml` with monitor entries, each declaring a type such as icmp, tcp, or http, a set of hosts or URLs, and a schedule. Heartbeat periodically probes each target and sends events to Elasticsearch or another configured output.

Common workflows include checking whether a website returns an expected status code or body, verifying that a TCP service accepts a connection or payload exchange, confirming host reachability by ICMP, loading dashboards, and alerting on availability or latency changes in Kibana.

The command-line package also includes setup and test commands shared by Beats, plus keystore support for secrets. The batch's curated config and credentials paths reflect Elastic's documented directory layout conventions for heartbeat.yml and heartbeat.keystore.

Why package nerds care

Heartbeat is package-significant because it is an observability agent: admins expect it to install cleanly, run as a service, read config from predictable paths, and keep secrets in a keystore. Those operational details are as important as the executable itself.

In package-manager terms, it is also part of the Elastic Beats era, when small single-purpose shippers were packaged independently. Installing only Heartbeat gave an operator uptime probes without deploying the whole Elastic Agent stack or writing custom monitoring scripts.

Timeline

• 2014-02: Elastic Beats repository created.
• 2017-01: Heartbeat introduced in beta according to Elastic's GA announcement.
• 2018-11: Elastic Stack 6.5 announced Heartbeat general availability.
• 2018-11: Elastic Uptime solution launched based on Heartbeat.
• 2019: Beats changelog entries show Heartbeat-specific uptime and SSL metadata fixes in the 6.8 series.
• 2021: Beats changelog entries show Heartbeat synthetics and browser-monitoring work in the 7.x series.
• 2024: Elastic docs preserve the Heartbeat reference alongside migration guidance to Elastic Agent.

Related projects

• Filebeat, Metricbeat, Packetbeat, Winlogbeat, Auditbeat, and Functionbeat are sibling Beats in the Elastic repository.
• Elasticsearch stores Heartbeat events, while Kibana provides dashboards, Uptime views, alerting, and visualization.
• Logstash can be used as an output path between Beats and Elasticsearch.
• Elastic Agent and Synthetic Monitoring are related successors or broader deployment models for many use cases.
• Metricbeat and APM are often combined with Heartbeat data during outage triage.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/elastic/beats
• https://github.com/elastic/beats
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/beats/master/CHANGELOG.asciidoc
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/beats/master/heartbeat/README.md
• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/beats/master/heartbeat/docs/overview.asciidoc
• https://www.elastic.co/beats/heartbeat
• https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-uptime-monitoring-solution-released
• https://www.elastic.co/blog/uptime-monitoring-with-heartbeat-and-the-elastic-stack
• https://www.elastic.co/docs/reference/beats/heartbeat
• https://www.elastic.co/docs/reference/beats/heartbeat/configuration-heartbeat-options
• https://www.elastic.co/docs/reference/beats/heartbeat/configuring-howto-heartbeat