A heartbeat is a UDP packet sent on port 5723 every 60 seconds that Operations Manager uses to monitor communication channels between the Operations Manager agent and its primary management server. If the Operations Manager management server fails to receive four consecutive heartbeats from an agent, two things happen:
- Operations Manager will generate a Health Service Heartbeat Failure alert, as shown in Figure 1.
FIGURE 1 Alert properties
- The management server will attempt to ping the computer that hosts the agent.
If the computer that hosts the agent does not respond to the ping request, Operations Manager will generate a Failed To Connect To Computer alert. If you see the Health Service Heartbeat Failure alert, but not the Failed To Connect To Computer alert, you can deduce that there is a problem with the Operations Manager agent, as the computer itself remains contactable. Both of these alerts will be closed automatically once heartbeat traffic resumes.
You can change the heartbeat settings for all management servers by performing the following steps:
1. In the Settings node of the Administration workspace of the Operations Manager console, click Heartbeat under Agent, and then click Properties.
2. On the Global Agent Settings dialog box, shown in Figure 2, adjust the heartbeat interval to the desired figure.
FIGURE 2 Global heartbeat settings
3. Under Server, click Heartbeat, and then click Properties in the Tasks pane.
4. On the Global Management Server Settings - Heartbeat dialog box, set the Number Of Missed Heartbeats Allowed, as shown in Figure 3.
FIGURE 3 Heartbeat settings
You can change the heartbeat settings for an individual computer by performing the following steps:
1. In the Agent Managed node of the Administration workspace of the Operations Manager console, click the computer for which you want to change the heartbeat settings, and then click Properties in the Tasks pane.
2. On the Heartbeat tab of the Agent Properties dialog box, select the Override Global Agent Settings check box, and specify the new Heartbeat settings. Figure 4 shows the heartbeat interval for computer Orchestrator.tailspintoys.internal set to 90 seconds.
FIGURE 4 Individual server heartbeat settings
You can trigger a Health Service Heartbeat Failure alert for testing purposes by stopping the Microsoft monitoring agent (formerly System Center Management service) on a computer with an agent installed, as shown in Figure 5
FIGURE 5 Stopped health service
