A Heartbeat Alert notifies you by email that the Monitoring server has not heard from one of your SearchStax Managed Search service nodes for some number of minutes. This creates an Incident in the Managed Search Dashboard. Most Heartbeat incidents are false alarms that resolve themselves within a few minutes. Some of them, however require remedial action.
High Load, High CPU
Heartbeat alerts can be caused by any situation that prevents the Monitoring Agent from sending status messages to the servers at SearchStax. For instance, sustained high CPU levels can delay the next report past the Heartbeat threshold. This is often associated with a heavy episode of indexing. If the alerts are associated with indexing events, consider throttling back the flow of /update messages or take steps to reduce the frequency of commits.
These spontaneous service interruptions are so common that we set up heartbeat alerts with a five-minute delay to avoid false positive alerts.
Memory Issues
When a Managed Search server is about to run out of memory, it sometimes shuts down the Monitoring Agent to scavenge resources. It does not automatically restart the Agent when the memory event resolves itself.
A system in this situation is likely to have suffered Out-of-Memory crashes. Look for “solr_oom_killer” log files on that node.
If the Solr Dashboard shows all nodes and replicas are up, only the Monitoring Agent might be down. Please open a support ticket so SearchStax engineers can restart the Agent for you.
Solr is Down
On the Solr dashboard, check the Cloud > Graph to see if all nodes/replicas are up. If a node is down, restart the node from the Managed Search dashboard. If problems persist, open a ticket with the SearchStax Support Desk.
Questions?
Do not hesitate to contact the SearchStax Support Desk.