EA heartbeat monitoring: how to know your trading robot is actually running

The silent failure every EA trader eventually has

An automated trading system fails quietly. The VPS reboots for a Windows update and MetaTrader does not restart. The terminal loses its broker connection and never reconnects. Someone closes the chart the Expert Advisor was running on. Algo Trading gets switched off. The EA itself hits an error and stops placing orders. In every one of these cases nothing looks wrong. The last trades are still there and the equity curve still ends where it ended, and you only find out when you notice the account has not traded for three days.

For an EA seller it is worse: a buyer looks at your public track record, sees the history, and has no way of knowing whether the robot behind it is trading today or died last Tuesday. Static track-record pages cannot answer that question, because they only know about closed trades.

Heartbeat monitoring closes that gap. It is the difference between a trading history and a live trading system.

What an EA heartbeat is

A heartbeat is a tiny, regular signal sent by the connector running inside your MetaTrader terminal, sent every few minutes whether or not any trade happened. Because it is time-based rather than trade-based, it keeps beating through quiet markets, weekends and long holds. Silence is the signal: if the heartbeat stops, the terminal, the connection, or the EA has stopped.

On ConfirmedTrades the heartbeat travels with every sync from the connector, and carries a health snapshot of the MetaTrader terminal with it: the ping to your broker, the latency of the sync itself, the terminal build, whether Algo Trading and DLL imports are allowed, memory and CPU on the machine or VPS, and a list of every chart that is open with the Expert Advisor attached to each one. That is what the Terminal & open charts card on your account page shows.

• Live-synced: the heartbeat arrived within the last few minutes; the system is running.
• Sync lost: no heartbeat for 30 minutes and the connector did not say goodbye; the terminal crashed, lost its connection, or the VPS is down.
• Connector unloaded: the connector told us it was being removed (chart closed, EA removed, terminal closed). Deliberate, not an outage.

Why sync lost and connector unloaded are different

A good trading robot monitor must tell an outage apart from an intended stop, otherwise it cries wolf every time you restart MetaTrader and you learn to ignore it. The ConfirmedTrades connector reports its own shutdown on the way out, with the reason (chart closed, EA removed, terminal closed, account changed) and the exact time, so a planned stop shows as *Connector unloaded* and never raises an alarm. Only true silence, where the heartbeat simply stops without a goodbye, becomes *Sync lost*.

Transient events such as recompiling the EA, changing the chart timeframe or editing inputs are ignored entirely, because the connector re-initialises immediately afterwards.

Heartbeat alerts: be told the moment your EA stops

Seeing the status on a page is useful; being told is what saves the week. Heartbeat alerts send you one message when an account goes quiet for 30 minutes, with when it was last seen and the usual causes, and one more when it is syncing again. They are off by default and switched on per account, so you watch the accounts that matter and not the demo you forgot about.

Alerts are designed not to spam you. If several accounts stop at the same time, typically a VPS going down, you get one combined message, never one per account. An account that drops and recovers between two checks sends nothing. A repeat notice for the same account is suppressed for an hour. You choose the channel: Telegram (the default, from a dedicated heartbeat bot so outage alerts never get buried among other messages) or email.

How to set up EA monitoring on ConfirmedTrades

If your account is already connected with the ConfirmedTrades connector, the heartbeat is already beating; there is nothing to install. To get alerts:

• Open Heartbeat in your dashboard. Every connected account is listed with its live status, last-seen time and terminal health.
• Switch Alerts on for each account you want watched (or do it from the account's Manage page).
• Under Settings → Notifications, keep *Sync alerts* on and connect Telegram if you want instant messages; enable the heartbeat bot with one tap so alerts arrive from their own bot.
• Optionally make the Terminal & open charts card public from the page-sections list, so buyers can see for themselves that your robot is live.

What to do when you get a sync-lost alert

Work down the list from cheapest to most likely. Is the VPS or computer on? Is MetaTrader open and logged in? The bottom-right corner should show a green connection bar, not No connection or Invalid account. Is the chart with the connector still open, and is the Algo Trading button in the toolbar green? Check the Experts tab for errors. Nine times out of ten it is a reboot that did not bring the terminal back, or a broker password change.

Once the terminal is back, the connector resumes on its next sync, catches up any trades that closed while it was offline, and you get the *back online* message. Nothing is lost from the track record; history is complete up to the last sync and picks up where it left off.

Why this matters for EA buyers and signal followers

If you are evaluating an EA or a signal rather than running one, heartbeat status is one of the most honest signals a track-record page can show, precisely because it cannot be faked retroactively: either the terminal pinged in the last few minutes or it did not. A seller who makes their terminal card public is showing you the robot is on, which chart it is attached to, and that the terminal has Algo Trading enabled. A record that has been *Sync lost* for weeks while the seller still markets it tells you something too.

Combine it with the rest of the due-diligence checklist, how to vet an EA, reading an account page and how long a track record needs to be, and you have the past and the present covered.