The driver heartbeat is a feature of the Identity Manager drivers that ship with Identity Manager 2 and later. Its use is optional. The driver heartbeat is configured by using a driver parameter with a time interval specified. If a heartbeat parameter exists and has an interval value other than 0, the driver sends a heartbeat document to the Metadirectory engine if there is no communication on the Publisher channel for the specified interval of time.
The intent of the driver heartbeat is to give you a trigger to allow you to initiate an action at regular intervals, if the driver does not communicate on the Publisher channel as often as you want the action to occur. To take advantage of the heartbeat, you must customize your driver configuration or other tools. The Metadirectory engine accepts the heartbeat document but does not take any action because of it.
For most drivers, a driver parameter for heartbeat is not used in the sample configurations, but you can add it.
A custom driver that is not provided with Identity Manager can also provide a heartbeat document, if the driver developer has written the driver to support it.
To configure the heartbeat:
In iManager, click .
Browse to and select your driver set object, then click .
In the Identity Manager Overview, click the upper right corner of the driver icon, then click .
On the tab, click , scroll to , then look for Heart Beat or a similar display name.
If a driver parameter already exists for heartbeat, you can change the interval and save the changes, and configuration is then complete.
The value of the interval cannot be less than 1. A value of 0 means the feature is turned off.
The unit of time is usually minutes; however, some drivers might choose to implement it differently, such as using seconds.
If a driver parameter does not exist for heartbeat, click .
Add a driver parameter entry like the following example, as a child of <publisher-options>.
<pub-heartbeat-interval display-name="Heart Beat">10</pub-heartbeat-interval>
If the driver does not produce a heartbeat document after being restarted, check the placement of the driver parameter in the XML.
Save the changes, and make sure the driver is stopped and restarted.
After you have added the driver parameter, you can edit the time interval by using the graphical view. Another option is to create a reference to a global configuration value (GCV) for the time interval. Like other global configuration values, the driver heartbeat can be set at the driver set level instead of on each individual driver object. If a driver does not have a particular global configuration value, and the driver set object does have it, the driver inherits the value from the driver set object.