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An EA that crashes loudly is easy to spot. One that silently stops — terminal frozen, connection lost, EA disabled after an update — can go unnoticed for hours.

A heartbeat approach:

• The EA writes a timestamp to a file or sends a web request every few minutes.
• An external script or service checks that the timestamp is recent.
• If not, it sends an alert by email, Telegram or SMS.

What to include in the heartbeat:

• Terminal connection status.
• Whether automated trading is enabled.
• Number of open positions and current equity.

Common causes of silent failures:

• Windows updates restarting the VPS.
• Broker server changes requiring a new login.
• AutoTrading button disabled.

How do you monitor your EAs, and have you had a silent failure?

Heartbeat content has to include the AutoTrading flag and open position count, not only a timestamp. A frozen terminal that still writes an old stamp is the silent fail the plain ping misses.

Alert path must still fire if the VPS dies. I use an external checker on another host that expects a fresh file or webhook; if the VPS never wakes, that checker is what pages me.

Silent fail shape I have seen: Windows update reboots the box at 07:40, terminal never auto starts, and the local heartbeat script dies with the machine. No email leaves the VPS, so only the external watcher catches it.

Broker server password changes and a disabled AutoTrading button sit on the same checklist. Connection green with automation off still leaves risk unmanaged if a position was open.

I test the alert by killing the heartbeat on purpose once a month. Have you had a silent freeze that your own monitor missed because it lived on the same box?

FXS Prop Desk, the part nobody tunes is the timeout on the external checker. With the EA writing a heartbeat every 60 seconds, the gap allowed before paging decides whether the alert gets trusted or muted.

On my VPS log, a 2 minute timeout paged me about 11 times a week from harmless hiccups, 3 minutes about 4, and 5 minutes about once. A 10 minute timeout went silent on false alarms but could leave me blind for up to 11 minutes.
That trade off is drawn in the illustration, false pages per week as bars with the worst detection delay under each. I run 5 minutes, so up to 6 minutes can pass before I know.

One more field earned its place: the age of the last EURUSD tick. A timer based heartbeat keeps firing even when the price feed has stalled, so during London I page if the newest tick is older than 90 seconds.

Weekends get a scheduled mute from Friday close to Sunday open. Otherwise it cries wolf every Saturday and I start ignoring it.

What timeout do you run on your checker, and do you include tick age or only the timer stamp? Settling on 5 took me three noisy weeks.