Monitoring bots: heartbeats and alerts

[Shadow Trader]

An automated strategy that fails silently is worse than one that fails loudly. Monitoring tells when something goes wrong, ideally before it costs money.

A heartbeat is the simplest form: the program sends a small signal at regular intervals to a monitoring service or file. If the signal stops, an alert triggers. That catches crashes, frozen platforms and lost connections.

Other useful checks: last tick timestamp, to detect stale data. Last trade time, to detect a strategy that stopped trading unexpectedly. Account equity and margin level against thresholds. Error counts in the log. Spread and latency measurements.

Alerts should reach the phone in a way that cuts through, such as push notifications or messages to a chat app. Too many alerts lead to ignoring them, so thresholds need tuning.

A daily summary message with trade count, net result and any warnings confirms normal operation, and an absence of the message is itself an alert.

Testing the monitoring by deliberately stopping the bot verifies that the alerts work. Untested alerts are hopes.

A practical add-on is a "dead man's switch" for trading hours: if no heartbeat arrives during the session, an email or message goes out, and if there's still no response in a set time, a pre-arranged backup, such as a script that closes positions through a different path, can run. Layers of simple checks beat one complicated system.

How is the automated system monitored, and has an alert ever caught a problem early?