Brief

This article introduces a 'heartbeat monitoring' pattern for AI agent pipelines, designed to catch silent failures where an agent stops working without throwing errors. Unlike traditional monitoring that alerts on active failures, this method uses a 'dead man's switch' to signal when a expected task completion ping is missed. The author explains why AI agents are particularly prone to these quiet failures due to model rate limits or graceful fallback responses, and provides implementation details using cURL and JavaScript, including setting appropriate intervals and grace windows for different agent frequencies. AI