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Heartbeat Sentinel

The Heartbeat Sentinel protects against Shadow AI scenarios where an autonomous agent goes “rogue” or “silent” — continuing to operate without reporting back, or crashing and leaving processes in an unknown state.

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Mechanism

The Sentinel functions as a Dead Man’s Switch. It expects a periodic “pulse” from the agent.

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States

  • ACTIVE 🟢: The agent is healthy and reporting regularly.
  • SILENT 🟡: The agent missed 1 heartbeat window (5 minutes). Warning issued.
  • ZOMBIE 🔴: The agent missed 3 heartbeat windows (15 minutes). Critical alert issued.

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Escalation Protocol

  1. Monitoring: The agent sends a heartbeat POST /heartbeat?agentId=xyz every N minutes.
  2. Alarm: If the deadline passes without a heartbeat, a Durable Object Alarm fires.
  3. Alerting:
    • SILENT: Logs a warning via webhook.
    • ZOMBIE: Escalates to a Critical Alert (PagerDuty/Slack/Email).
  4. Recovery: If a ZOMBIE agent sends a heartbeat, the system marks it as RECOVERED, logging the outage duration.

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Integration

Use the Sentinel SDK to automatically manage heartbeats: 
import { ABS } from "@abs/sentinel";

const abs = new ABS({ dsn: "...", heartbeatInterval: 60000 });

// Starts background heartbeat loop
abs.startHeartbeat("my-agent-01");
Or call the API directly: 
curl -X POST "https://api.abscore.app/v1/heartbeat?agentId=my-agent-01" \
     -H "Authorization: Bearer $ABS_TOKEN"