What is hertzbeat?

Apache HertzBeat is an open-source monitoring and alerting platform that watches over your websites, databases, servers, and applications in real time, then notifies you when something goes wrong. It rolls four functions into one place: collecting data from your systems, analyzing that data, triggering alerts when thresholds are crossed, and sending those alerts to wherever your team pays attention, such as email, Slack, Telegram, DingTalk, WeChat, or a plain webhook. One of its key selling points is that you do not need to install any extra software on the machines you want to monitor. HertzBeat reaches out and collects what it needs over standard protocols like HTTP, SSH, JDBC for databases, and SNMP for network devices. Each type of thing you want to monitor is described in a simple configuration file, so adding a new kind of target, say a new database type or a cloud service, means writing or importing a short template rather than deploying more software. HertzBeat also handles logs alongside metrics, pulling them in through a standard protocol called OTLP so everything lands in one dashboard. It includes a status page builder, which lets you publish a public-facing page showing whether your services are up, useful for communicating with customers during outages. The project recently added AI-powered features under the label HertzBeat AI, including a built-in MCP Server capability, though the README does not detail exactly what these AI features do at the user level. The system is built to scale horizontally, meaning you can add more collector nodes as your monitoring needs grow. The full README is longer than what was shown.