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.
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_local-cluster-name~remote-partner-cluster-name. 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.
If you create a custom heartbeat, you must add at least one plug-in to prevent the partnership from remaining in degraded mode.