What you are seeing aren't errors, they are just status reports by the heartbeat agent indicating that the status of the EventSentry service is changing.

When the system boots, the EventSentry service is starting up, and as such is in a pending state. If the Heartbeat Agent is ready before the regular agent is, then a message like this will be logged.

Finally, after the boot is complete and the EventSentry agent is running, the heartbeat agent reports that the agent changed its status from ERROR to OK.

If you are just monitoring one host, then you probably don't need to have the Heartbeat agent running. In the management console, you can simply set the startup type of the HB agent to manual. To do this, simply click the "Heartbeat" button to configure the heartbeat agent. There, on the bottom part of the screen, click the "Change service startup type to:" button that says "Manual".

Upon the next reboot, those message should not appear anymore.

Thanks, Ingmar. I appreciate your explanation of the underlying mechanism causing the messages. This seems like a strange way of treating predictable, routine program activity. I'm glad to know that it's a problem of no significance.

Hi Jeffrey,

The Heartbeat Agent is designed to monitor dozens of remote systems, so in that scenario the message are very relevant and important.

The EventSentry agent is usually running by the time the heartbeat agent is running, but in your case it takes the other a agent a little bit longer - hence the message. It's definitely not predictable, and there would be other ways to resolve this. However in your case just disabling that service is the most straightforward solution.

Ingmar, I took your suggestion, and disabled the Heartbeat service from the MMC, since the toggle button in the EventSentry interface only offers the choice of Manual and Automatic. Before I did, I looked again at Help and the Users Guide to see what I would be missing - and couldn't find anything definite. Despite all the information on how to configure and customize the Heartbeat agent, there is no clear statement of what it will be monitoring. Putting together parts of several comments, I'm guessing that the Monitor basically only checks to see if EventSentry is working on the networked computers, and whether or not each computer is reachable. Is that correct?

Hi Jeffrey,

You are correct. The functionality of the heartbeat monitor is documented here:

http://www.eventsentry.com/features/network-monitoring
http://www.netikus.net/software/eventsentry/overview/HTML/index.html?heartbeatmonitoring.htm

You can also use the search functionality on the http://www.eventsentry.com web site to search for more information on a topic.

You are correct however, the functionality of the heartbeat agent could be described better in the main EventSentry documentation. I will see that this gets improved with the next release.

Thank you for your feedback.