Health Monitoring

Health monitoring gives you deep visibility into your Magento store's internal systems. Unlike HTTP checks that only verify your site is responding, health monitoring tracks the status of critical subsystems like cron jobs, indexers, cache, search engine, and more.

How It Works

1. Install the Byte8_Pulsar Magento 2 extension on your store
2. Configure the API key in Magento Admin > Stores > Configuration > Byte8 > Pulsar
3. Enter the same API key in your Pulsar dashboard under Health Endpoint settings
4. Pulsar periodically calls your store's /pulsar/health endpoint and evaluates the response

Each health check returns data from up to 19 collectors, each monitoring a different subsystem.

Collectors

Collector	What It Monitors
Cron	Cron job execution, pending/stuck/failed jobs, heartbeat
Indexer	Index status (valid, invalid, working), stuck indexers
Cache	Cache types (config, layout, FPC, block_html), invalidation status, Varnish
Database	Connection health, thread count, uptime
Database Size	Total database size, largest tables
System	PHP version, disk space, memory limits, Magento version
Search	OpenSearch/Elasticsearch cluster health, index count, shards
Queue	Message queue status (pending, in-progress, errors)
Deploy	Deployment mode (production/developer), compilation, maintenance mode
Redis	Redis instances (cache, session, page_cache), memory, evictions
Log	Log file sizes, debug logging status, report count
Admin Security	Admin users, 2FA enrollment, failed logins, locked accounts
Config Hygiene	JS/CSS merge settings, async email, configuration best practices
SSL	Certificate validity, expiry date, issuer
Orders	Order volume (24h), failed/canceled orders, stuck payments
Integrations	Third-party integration status
PHP-FPM	PHP-FPM process pool status
Media Integrity	Media directory security (.htaccess rules, executable files)
Upload Endpoint	Suspicious upload activity in access logs

Each collector reports one of three statuses:

• Healthy - Operating normally
• Degraded - Partial issues, may need attention
• Critical - Immediate attention required

Collector Overrides

You can configure per-collector alert behavior directly in Pulsar, without changing your Magento extension settings. This is useful when:

• A collector is noisy (e.g., cron flapping between degraded/healthy)
• You want to acknowledge a known issue without receiving repeated alerts
• You only care about critical failures for certain collectors

Mute a Collector

Muting a collector suppresses all alerts for it. The collector data is still collected and displayed, but no alerts or notifications are generated.

Minimum Severity

Set the minimum severity threshold per collector:

• Any issue (default) - Alert on both degraded and critical
• Critical only - Only alert when the collector reaches critical status

How to Configure

1. Navigate to your site's detail page in the Pulsar dashboard
2. Find the Collector Alert Overrides card (visible when health monitoring is enabled)
3. Click Configure
4. Toggle mute or set severity thresholds for individual collectors
5. Click Save Overrides

Alert Logic

Health monitoring uses a confirmation-based system to prevent false alerts:

1. Confirmation threshold - A health check must fail consecutively (default: 2 times) before an alert is created
2. Per-collector tracking - New collector failures generate alerts even if the site is already degraded
3. Flapping detection - If a collector keeps toggling between healthy and degraded, Pulsar detects the pattern and avoids duplicate alerts
4. Recovery confirmation - The site must be fully healthy for consecutive checks before a recovery notification is sent

Alert Types

Alert Type	Trigger
health_degraded	One or more collectors degraded
health_critical	One or more collectors critical
Recovery	All collectors healthy, confirmed

Enabling/Disabling Collectors

Collectors can be enabled or disabled at two levels:

1. Magento extension (in Magento Admin) - Controls whether the collector runs and reports data
2. Pulsar dashboard (Collector Overrides) - Controls whether Pulsar generates alerts for the collector

If a collector is disabled in Magento, it won't appear in health check results. If it's muted in Pulsar, data is still collected but alerts are suppressed.