Heartbeat and Elastic Agent

[lamp123432 (Salt Lamp)]

Hello,

If I install Elastic Agent on a Windows 10 machine, and then I want to see the machine in Uptime, why do I need to ping it using Heartbeat? Should not the agent know already it's uptime? Will not this make sense to integrate them seamlessly?

[Andrew_Cholakian1 (Andrew Cholakian)]

Thanks for the feedback! Is your expectation that all machines with Agent enrolled would appear in the Uptime UI?

We're still working on uptime support for agent, but that wasn't a use case we'd considered. You can already see the status of agent nodes in the Fleet UI, but it's an interesting thought.

We could add a 'self check' type, that just says "I'm here" at a regular interval. Would that meet your needs?

[lamp123432 (Salt Lamp)]

Exactly, we have a bunch of Windows 10 PCs with Elastic Agent installed, and when I click on them, I have a choice to see the metrics, the logs, and the uptime.

Uptime is empty and I have to setup heartbeat separately, but why would I do that if I already have the best possible view of the host (through an agent installed locally)? It doesn't make sense to me setting up an external ping when I have a way better view through the agent (the agent knows about all IPs, interfaces, and ports!).

So some kind of uptime integration to Elastic Agent to deploy locally on each host, then I could select to monitor the uptime for different ports.

Say my host runs a web service, Uptime will tell me when it's up, when it's down. I guess the Latency won't matter in this kind of implementation (will probably be less than 1ms). Another example is just to monitor the different interfaces for up/down statistics.

Just an idea, we're not setting up heartbeat/Uptime so every time we click on "see uptime for the host", we're disappointed by the lack of data.

Also, setting up heartbeat/uptime requires access to the network through the NAT, or some kind of internal node, but if I want to use Elastic Cloud and deploy a few agents, there is no node needed, and I won't set up a node just for heartbeat.