[devoutsalsa]

Writing a heartbeat process using UDP for a Fluentd logger is as one of the first things I learned in Elixir! In my case, basically when then there was no heartbeat, the TCP forwarder /w a connection pool would be taken offline. When the heartbeat came back, the forwarder was free to send messages again.

The heartbeat process itself basically just sent pings every second on a UDP port and waited for a reply. If we didn’t get a reply in one second, it’d assume the connection was bad until a ping came again.