Heartbeat and Status

Outcome

You will understand what TMXIO means by “heartbeat” for a connected external WordPress site, what each status value implies, and what to do when the status drifts from healthy to degraded or disconnected. By the time you finish this page you should be able to read a site’s status row in TMXIO and immediately know whether you need to take action, wait, or escalate.

What a Heartbeat Is

A heartbeat is a small periodic call from the TMXIO WordPress Plugin running on your site, addressed to the TMXIO API. The call carries a minimal payload (site identifier, environment, plugin version, and a checksum used to detect tampering) and expects a 200 OK response. The plugin sends one heartbeat per minute under normal operation. TMXIO uses those heartbeats both to update the site’s last-seen timestamp in the dashboard and to confirm the plugin is still trusted, current, and reachable.

The heartbeat is intentionally lightweight. It does not transfer site content, database rows, or files. Backups, restores, and 1-Click Access all run on separate code paths with their own authentication.

The Heartbeat Flow

The diagram below shows the steady-state flow between the WordPress plugin, the TMXIO API, and the TMXIO dashboard.

sequenceDiagram
  participant WP as WordPress plugin
  participant API as TMXIO API
  participant UI as TMXIO dashboard
  loop every minute
    WP->>API: POST /heartbeat (site id, env, version)
    API-->>WP: 200 OK
    API->>UI: update last-seen + status
  end
  Note over WP,API: After 3 missed beats, status -> degraded.<br/>After 10 missed, -> disconnected.

The cadence is deliberately conservative. A single failed heartbeat is not enough to change a site’s status. Status changes happen on accumulated misses, so a brief network blip on the WordPress host does not produce a false alert on the dashboard.

Status Values

TMXIO surfaces a small number of status values for each connected external site. The table below summarizes what each one means, what tends to cause it, and what you should do when you see it.

Status	Meaning	Typical cause	What to do
Healthy	Heartbeats arrived on time recently.	Normal operation.	Nothing. The site is reporting in.
Degraded	Three or more heartbeats missed in a row, but fewer than ten.	Brief outbound network issue on the WordPress host, host CPU saturation, or a slow cron run.	Open the plugin and run Test Connection. If it succeeds, the next heartbeat should clear the status.
Disconnected	Ten or more consecutive missed heartbeats.	The site is offline, the plugin is deactivated, credentials have been revoked, or an edge layer is blocking the outbound call.	Confirm the site loads in a browser, then run Test Connection. If that fails, follow External Troubleshooting.
Out of date	Heartbeats arriving normally, but the reported plugin version is older than the minimum we accept.	The site has not run a plugin update in a long time.	Update the TMXIO WordPress Plugin from the WordPress admin area.
Unverified	Heartbeats arriving, but the site identifier or checksum does not match what we expected.	Site cloned or migrated without a clean reconnect, or two installs sharing the same credentials.	Disconnect and reconnect the affected install. See Disconnect and Reconnect.

The exact wording shown in the dashboard may differ from the words in the left column above, but the underlying meaning is the same.

Checking a Site Manually

When a site shows up as degraded or disconnected and you want to confirm the state from inside WordPress, use the plugin’s Test Connection action. It runs the same path the heartbeat uses, so a successful test almost always means the next scheduled heartbeat will land too.

A failing Test Connection is more informative than a missing heartbeat. The plugin shows the failure mode (DNS, TLS, credential rejection, edge auth, timeout) directly, which is usually enough to point you at the right troubleshooting section.

Caution

Firewalls and edge protection layers are the single most common reason a site shows up as disconnected while still loading fine in a browser. Cloudflare bot challenges, AWS WAF rate rules, Wordfence “country block” rules, and aggressive .htaccess deny rules can all silently swallow the outbound heartbeat call without affecting human visitors. If the site renders normally but is reporting as disconnected, check those layers before assuming the plugin or the WordPress install is at fault.

How Long a Status Sticks

TMXIO does not require a successful heartbeat to clear the previous status instantly. Instead the status moves on the next successful round trip after the missed-count condition is no longer true. In practice this means:

• A degraded site clears to healthy on the next successful heartbeat.
• A disconnected site clears to healthy after one successful heartbeat, but the dashboard may take an additional refresh cycle to reflect the change in the listing view.
• A site that was disconnected for an extended period and is now healthy will keep its incident history visible until your team marks the incident resolved.

If a site flips between healthy and degraded repeatedly within a short window, treat that as its own problem rather than a transient hiccup. Repeated flapping is almost always caused by a flaky outbound network path or an overloaded host.

What Success Looks Like

• Test Connection succeeds without retry.
• The site’s last-seen timestamp in TMXIO is within the past few minutes.
• The plugin’s version reported in TMXIO matches the version installed in WordPress.
• The status reads healthy, with no recent transitions through degraded or disconnected.

Related Troubleshooting

If Test Connection fails or a site refuses to clear from disconnected, go to External Troubleshooting and capture the exact wording the plugin shows when the test fails. The error wording is what support uses to triage the failure.