Uptime as a selling point: heartbeat monitoring for EA vendors

"Is it still running?" is a sales question

Heartbeat monitoring for EA vendors answers the question every buyer has and almost no track record can: is the robot behind this page alive right now? A history ends at its last trade. It cannot tell a prospective buyer whether the Expert Advisor closed that trade this morning or whether the VPS fell over three weeks ago and the seller has not noticed. For a vendor who markets reliability, that gap is expensive, because the buyer fills it with the worst case.

The honest part is that outages happen to everyone. Windows updates reboot the VPS and MetaTrader does not come back. The broker forces a password change. Someone closes the chart. A forex robot that is not running is not losing, but it is also not building the record you are selling from, and a buyer who spots a three-week gap in the calendar will ask.

What the heartbeat is

The ConfirmedTrades connector pings the platform from the terminal every few minutes regardless of whether anything traded. That ping carries a health snapshot: ping to the broker's trade server, the connector's own sync latency, terminal build, whether Algo Trading and DLL imports are allowed, memory and CPU cores on the machine, and the list of open charts with the EA attached to each. Ping and memory are not measured on MetaTrader 4.

The Heartbeat page in your dashboard lists every connected account with one of three states. Live-synced means a ping arrived recently. Sync lost means 30 minutes of silence with no goodbye from the connector: a crash, a dead connection, a down VPS. Connector unloaded means the connector reported its own removal (chart closed, EA removed, terminal closed), which is deliberate and never treated as an outage.

Making uptime visible to buyers

By default the Terminal & open charts card is owner-only. It is one of the reorderable sections on the account page, so you can switch it on for visitors from the section list like any other. When you do, a buyer sees the live status, the last-seen time, and the open charts with your EA's name on them. That is a stronger claim than "runs 24/5 on a VPS" in a listing, because it is checkable and because it cannot be faked retroactively: either the terminal pinged in the last few minutes or it did not.

Think about what else the tiles say before you expose them. Autotrading "Allowed" and a chart list showing your EA on the right symbol is the point. A terminal build two years old, or DLL imports "Allowed" when your EA does not need them, are small things a sharp buyer will read as sloppiness. Tidy the terminal, then make the card public.

Alerts: find out before your buyers do

Heartbeat alerts are opt-in per account, switched on from the Heartbeat page or the account's Manage page, with a master Sync alerts switch under Settings → Notifications. When an account is silent for 30 minutes you get one message saying when it was last seen and the usual causes, and one more when it is back. Telegram is the default channel, from a dedicated heartbeat bot so outage messages do not get buried; email is the alternative, and undeliverable Telegram messages fall back to email.

The anti-spam rules matter if you run several accounts. All accounts that change state in the same check are combined into one digest, so a VPS going down produces one message, not ten. An account that drops and recovers between two checks sends nothing. A repeat "stopped" notice for the same account is suppressed for an hour. Alerts come with the Founder tier, which is earned through the Founder programme rather than bought; live status on the Heartbeat page is on every plan.

EA heartbeat monitoring has the full troubleshooting list for a Sync lost alert. The short version is that it is nearly always a reboot that did not restart the terminal or a broker password change.

What uptime does to the record itself

An outage does not corrupt the track record. When the terminal comes back, the connector catches up the trades that closed while it was offline, and history is complete up to the last sync. What an outage does cost is activity: the Score's longevity component includes recency, and a long silence drifts the activity level toward Dormant. For a vendor that is a visible penalty for a problem buyers could not otherwise see.

There is one subtlety worth stating plainly. The connector's own sync interval depends on plan, every 15 minutes on Free down to every minute on higher tiers, but the heartbeat is separate from that and the 30-minute Sync lost threshold applies to every plan. A Free account with an EA that trades twice a week still shows Live-synced all week, because the heartbeat is time-based, not trade-based.

Turning it into a line on the listing

Once the card is public and alerts are on, the listing can say something specific instead of something hopeful. For example: "Live terminal status is shown on the verified page, including the chart the EA runs on. Outages alert me within 30 minutes." Then link the page. A buyer who clicks through, sees Live-synced and a last-seen time of four minutes ago, has just verified your uptime claim without asking you anything.

This also handles the opposite case with grace. If you take the EA offline on purpose, for a broker migration or a version upgrade, unload the connector properly by removing it from the chart rather than killing the terminal. The card then reads Connector unloaded with a reason, which is honest, instead of Sync lost, which looks like a failure.

Setup in five steps

• Update to the latest connector if the Terminal card says "waiting for first sync".
• Open Heartbeat in the dashboard and confirm each selling account reads Live-synced.
• Switch Alerts on for each of those accounts, and connect Telegram under Settings → Notifications if you want instant messages.
• Check the terminal tiles you are about to show: build, Autotrading, DLL imports, chart list.
• Enable the Terminal & open charts section for visitors, and mention live status in the listing.