Heartbeat

Enable Heartbeat Schedule – Sets a daily scheduled task to email a ‘Heartbeat’ (see below.)  Time must be specified in 24 hour format and hh:mm:ss so 8am is 08:00:00 and 2:30pm is 14:30:00 – failure to leave off any leading or trailing zeros or the seconds digits entirely will result in a failed schedule creation!

Heartbeat Options

A Heartbeat is a daily email digest of a PC’s health.  A quick report is generated on the PC and event alerts (defined for the Event Monitoring Service) since the last Heartbeat are displayed here.  The Heartbeat is a very convenient way to bundle and save event rule alerts and get them daily, when you don’t want them in real-time.  Likewise, you can choose not to enable the Heartbeat schedule, but you can still have a Heartbeat performed optionally with every maintenance, which can be useful to get a weekly digest of information instead of daily.

Enable Minidump Management and Reporting System – (Not pictured)  By default, even when this option is disabled, a Heartbeat will include the last minidump (crash dump) found from a previous blue screen, and attach the minidump to the notification email for you to analyze.  The problem becomes that with every Heartbeat you will be getting the same old information about the last minidump, when there hasn’t been a new one.  When enabling this option, dSupportSuite downloads / runs Nirsoft’s Bluescreenview for an analysis of all minidumps currently in the native minidump store, then moves them from to %systemdrive%SupportMinidumps where they are saved if they are needed in the future, and they are out of the way the next time a Heartbeat occurs so you won’t get outdated or redundant information.

Report newly installed applications … – Takes a scan of all installed apps on the system at each Heartbeat.  On a subsequent Heartbeat it compares the list and reports new entries.

Report all services … – This option is usually misleading.  It reports all services which are configured to automatically start with Windows, which are currently NOT running.  It can indicate a failed service or application, however other times it means absolutely nothing as some services by their very nature start with Windows but stop shortly after.

Services to check during Heartbeat – This just reports the status of a service at the time of the Heartbeat.  Useful to monitor certain app services for failure.  Type a service name (the real name, not the display name) in the box and add it to the list below, or select from a list of running services.

Free space checklist – Check one or more secondary partitions for their available drive space during the Heartbeat.  Note the OS partition is automatically checked.