Is there a heartbeat check interface

[mitht]

How to check if the OpenTelemetry agent is still running through heartbeat detection? Does OpenTelemetry provide a probing interface?

[jack-berg]

Transferring to opentelemetry-java-instrumentation, since this repo doesn't contain the agent.

[jack-berg]

The otel java agent doesn't run as a separate process, so a traditional heartbeat isn't really applicable. If you haven't disabled the runtime-telemetry instrumentation, you should be able to reliably see runtime telemetry metrics exported on a regular interval. This can be used as a sort of heartbeat.

[mitht]

Which metric do you recommend to use?

[trask]

any of them should be ok to use as a heartbeat

also check out open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification#2923