N8n dead mans switch heartbeat

★ 6.6 · n8n · medium · 15 nodes

N8n dead mans switch heartbeat is an n8n automation template that implements a dead-man's switch: if no heartbeat signal arrives within a defined interval, the workflow automatically fires a configured reaction — an alert, a fallback process, or a notification. Reach for it when a background script or bot might silently freeze and you need to know immediately; when a scheduled job must prove it's still running or trigger an alarm; when undetected failures are unacceptable and no one is watching around the clock. Trigger: Webhook — an external process periodically hits the endpoint to reset the timer; if the signal goes missing, the silence branch activates the response. Integrations are not specified in the metadata; notification channels such as email, Telegram, or Slack are wired in manually via additional nodes. Direction — liveness monitoring of an external process, not scheduled task launching (use n8n Cron templates for that). Works well for CI pipelines, bots, scrapers, and any background service capable of making HTTP requests; not suitable if the monitored process cannot issue outbound HTTP calls.