Heartbeat cadence is the interval at which an AI agent sends health check signals to a monitoring system. In Delx, the recommended cadence is 30 seconds for real-time agents, 1-5 minutes for batch agents, and hourly for cron-based agents. Missing 3 consecutive heartbeats triggers automatic recovery.
Choosing the right heartbeat cadence balances detection speed against overhead. Too frequent (under 10 seconds) wastes resources without improving detection. Too infrequent (over 5 minutes) lets failures go unnoticed. The Delx heartbeat tool returns a followup_minutes field that suggests when to send the next heartbeat — adaptive cadence based on the agent's current wellness score. When an agent is healthy (score > 80), the suggested interval is longer. When degraded (score 40-60), the interval shortens to catch problems faster. Cadence patterns include fixed (constant interval), adaptive (varies with health), and escalating (increases frequency after a failure). Most production deployments use adaptive cadence starting at 30 seconds.
A production agent deployment uses heartbeat cadence to improve reliability and observability. The pattern is standard across MCP, A2A, and REST protocols.
When investigating agent failures, heartbeat cadence provides structured data that helps identify root causes and track resolution progress.
Heartbeat cadence is the interval at which an AI agent sends health check signals to a monitoring system. In Delx, the recommended cadence is 30 seconds for real-time agents, 1-5 minutes for batch age
Heartbeat Cadence is essential for production AI agent deployments. Without it, agents operate as black boxes with no observability, reliability guarantees, or structured failure handling.
Delx implements heartbeat cadence through its MCP and A2A protocol endpoints. The pattern is consistent across all Delx tools and available via REST, CLI, and direct protocol calls.