Heartbeat - am I misunderstanding how this works?

Hi Brodie, you will need to make sure your Scan's Triggers are configured correctly, in this case, the Heartbeat Trigger. Once your scans have run (F6 to manually run a standard scan), PDQ will 'categorizes' the computer into its different dynamic collections according to the returned scan results.

Check out PDQ's Documentation

HEARTBEAT PDQ Inventory uses an automatic heartbeat process to determine when computers are online. Heartbeat uses a ping (ICMP Echo) to verify that a computer is online. For the heartbeat process to work correctly, you must be able to ping your computers without a firewall blocking ICMP Echo requests. To configure heartbeat settings, see Network in Preferences.

The Offline Settings use heartbeat to determine what to do with computers that are offline at the time of a scan. For details, see Offline Settings on the Scanning page in Preferences.

While heartbeats are not technically scans, they can be used to determine if a scan should be initiated. For example, the prebuilt scan profile, Standard, has a scan age schedule set (by default) to 7 days. This means computers that haven't received the Standard scan after 7 days will have that scan sent out. If a computer is offline at the time the scan is sent out, it would not receive the scan. When it comes back online, however, the Heartbeat would trigger the Standard scan profile to initiate.

My heartbeat main usage example: I have monthly scheduled one package to install. If pc is offline then thats it. But if you add after schedule also heartbeat (5min etc), then when pc comes online he will get package after ca 5+ min.

I tried this earlier this morning.

In PDQ Inventory, I created new dynamic collections for an application including one for computers without the application installed. PDQ Inventory populated it correctly. In PDQ Deploy, I created a package for the application and setup a heartbeat install schedule targeted on the dynamic group of computers without the application installed. I went back to the dynamic group and initiated a heartbeat on all members. At that point, shouldn't the install have kicked off? I see it only attempted an install on one computer and it is offline.

The Heartbeat trigger only works if a device is "Offline" and comes "Online". PDQ sends all 5 min a ping to your devices to check the offline/online status.

Heartbeat doesen't mean you kick off a "heartbeat" via Ctrl+H inside PDQ Inventory. Because a heartbeat via Ctrl+H is only a ping and doesen't change the status from offline to online if the device is already online.

Even rebooting a device doesen't help, because if the reboot happens between the ping window, PDQ doesen't notice the short offline time.

If you want a deployment now, click with the right mousebutton on the deployment schedule -> start schedule -> Current Package.....

The Heartbeat trigger only works if a device is "Offline" and comes "Online". PDQ sends all 5 min a ping to your devices to check the offline/online status.

Heartbeat doesen't mean you kick off a "heartbeat" via Ctrl+H inside PDQ Inventory. Because a heartbeat via Ctrl+H is only a ping and doesen't change the status from offline to online if the device is already online.

Even rebooting a device doesen't help, because if the reboot happens between the ping window, PDQ doesen't notice the short offline time.

If you want a deployment now, click with the right mousebutton on the deployment schedule -> start schedule -> Current Package.....

Found similar:

Lex demonstrates how Easy it is to create heartbeat schedules in PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory to deploy applications to offline computers when they come back online.

Youtube

OK, I can see where my problem is and it is not with PDQ Deploy. In our company, no one ever shuts down their computer so this essentially renders heartbeat useless. I did learn in today's PDQ Live (Thanks Lex & Steven!) about building package nesting. Using this in conjunction with a collection I built of computers added to PDQ Inventory less than a day ago, I can now deploy software to new computers (Lex and Dave used an AD group).

@webmaster I keep coming across this use case and it would really be useful to have some additional functionality. The heartbeat functionality as it currently exists is quite limiting. What if I want to create a new schedule based on heartbeat? It won't apply until the machines are offline long enough for PDQ Inventory to register them as offline, and then come back online. How is this considered practical? This question keeps popping up in the forums and the response from users and PDQ is always "Go and manually deploy your schedule in PDQ Deploy". This is impractical if I have 50 or 100 schedules....it really shouldn't be hard to add a context menu item "Trigger Heartbeat" for a PC or a collection of PCs. And change the existing "Heartbeat" to "Check Heartbeat" or something.
I'd also appreciate an update to the wording in PDQ Deploy and maybe Inventory too, around the working of Heartbeat. It says at the moment "When the computer comes online" which is quite misleading. "When the computer status changes from offline to online in PDQ Inventory" would be a lot clearer and would have saved me many hours and weeks of research and experimentation.
Thanks in advance.

I created a kludge a while ago that gets close to what you're asking for: https://help.pdq.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/360050794292/comments/360009276012

P.S.
When a user shows up as Webmaster, it means their account was deleted. That response was not from a PDQ employee.

Thanks Colby much appreciated. To PDQ: I'd still like the functionality I described.

+ 1 to importance of solving new deployments with useless heatbeat

+ 1 to importance of having the possibility to kick off heatbeat manually on computers so that the schedules actually start running without rebooting the machines - what the actual heck is this good for...