How 5 production OVH hosts heartbeat back to StackSmith every 60 seconds with host stats, container state, and Kubernetes telemetry — and why this design choice eliminates the need for a service mesh, a sidecar agent, and a separate metrics pipeline.
Live repository
What the article will cover
The pull vs push question
Why heartbeats from agents to mothership beat traditional pull-monitoring for a heterogeneous fleet.
Agent anatomy
A single Go binary that runs as a systemd service on every host. What it collects, when, and how it serializes.
The 60-second heartbeat
Why one minute is the sweet spot, what happens if you miss one, and the watchdog timer that escalates stale hosts.
Authentication
Per-agent bootstrap tokens, mTLS to the mothership, and how a stolen agent token gets revoked.
Inside Kubernetes
The companion stacksmith-k8-agent runs as a DaemonSet, reporting from inside the cluster — and how its data merges with the host-level agent stream.
Why no service mesh
A walk through what Linkerd / Istio would have added and why we don't need it — the agent IS the data plane.