# Heartbeat Alerting Question

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heartbeat-alerting-question/178119>\
**Category:** Beats\
**Tags:** elastic-stack-alerting, heartbeat\
**Created:** [April 23, 2019, 9:06pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heartbeat-alerting-question/178119 "2019-04-23T21:06:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Kyle123](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/49beb7/32.png) [@Kyle123](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Kyle123)\
**Post date:** [April 23, 2019, 9:06pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heartbeat-alerting-question/178119/1 "2019-04-23T21:06:20Z")

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Hello,

I am trying to find out a way to do alerting on downed hosts with watcher though I am running into an issue trying to figure out how to handle throttling the alerts. Once a given host is down I only want it to send one email alert then throttle for 24 hours. But I still want it to alert if a new host goes down meaning I can't really use the throttle feature.

One solution could be to make a watcher for each host but I don't know what the scalability/performance impact of that would be.

Has anyone else ran into a similar situation with alerting using watcher?

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**Author:** ![Andrew\_Cholakian1](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/andrew_cholakian1/32/3612_2.png) [@Andrew\_Cholakian1](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Andrew_Cholakian1)\
**Post date:** [April 23, 2019, 9:46pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heartbeat-alerting-question/178119/2 "2019-04-23T21:46:57Z")

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@Kyle123 It used to be true that creating a watch per host didn't scale. However, that is no longer the case, and should work just fine!

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**Author:** ![spinscale](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/spinscale/32/25011_2.png) [@spinscale](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/spinscale)\
**Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 6:04am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heartbeat-alerting-question/178119/3 "2019-04-25T06:04:21Z")

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Since Elasticsearch 6.0, watches are running distributed across the cluster, so you can run far more watches at parallel.

Can you indicate about how many hosts you want to monitor?

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**Author:** ![Kyle123](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/49beb7/32.png) [@Kyle123](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Kyle123)\
**Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 1:00pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heartbeat-alerting-question/178119/4 "2019-04-25T13:00:45Z")

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We are looking to monitor around 250 hosts.

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**Author:** ![spinscale](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/spinscale/32/25011_2.png) [@spinscale](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/spinscale)\
**Post date:** [April 25, 2019, 1:17pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heartbeat-alerting-question/178119/5 "2019-04-25T13:17:21Z")

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you can easily do that on a per host base.

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [May 23, 2019, 1:17pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/heartbeat-alerting-question/178119/6 "2019-05-23T13:17:24Z")

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