Introduction to Heartbeats

A heartbeat in Geographic Edition is a container for a collection of heartbeat plug-ins. A heartbeat has a name and one property that you can tune, Query_interval. The Query_interval property specifies the delay between heartbeat status requests.

The heartbeat plug-in facilitates the actual physical monitoring activity. The plug-in is defined by a required query command or query library, an optional requester and responder agent, a type, and a Plugin_properties string.

The Geographic Edition product provides the following default plug-ins:

• tcp_udp_plugin — Performs a simple heartbeat check on the cluster logical host IP address. If tcp_udp_plugin cannot use UDP port 2084, the plug-in tries to use TCP port 2084.

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  Note - The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) has officially assigned port number 2084 for use by the Geographic Edition heartbeats.

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• ping_plugin — Pings the cluster logical hostname on the remote cluster.

A default heartbeat that uses the default heartbeat plug-ins is created every time you run geops create or geops join without specifying a custom heartbeat. The name of the default heartbeat is hb_localclustername~remoteclustername. For more information about the geops command, refer to the geops(1M) man page.

You can create custom heartbeat plug-ins and associate them with existing default heartbeats or with new custom heartbeats.