Live agents

The Agents view answers a question traces alone cannot: is the agent process alive right now? Every instrumented process with the heartbeat enabled reports in, and Rius classifies each instance by liveness:

Instances group under their agent name; the chips at the top filter by status. Open trace jumps from a running instance straight to the trace it is working on.

Heartbeats

Heartbeats are on by default in both SDKs, in Python since 0.10.0 and in TypeScript since 0.2.0: every init() reports in for the process’s lifetime, so instrumented agents appear here without any extra configuration. On older SDK versions, or after opting out, enable them explicitly:

import rius
 
rius.init(
    api_key="ri_...",
    service_name="support-agent",
    heartbeat=True,                # or RIUS_HEARTBEAT=true; the default since 0.10.0
)

import { init } from '@glassflow-ai/rius'
 
const client = init({
  apiKey: 'ri_...',
  serviceName: 'support-agent',
  heartbeat: true, // or RIUS_HEARTBEAT=true; the default since 0.2.0
})

• heartbeat_interval sets the seconds between pings (default 15, clamped to 5-300). The staleness thresholds below are derived from it, so a slower interval also slows detection.
• agent_name sets the identity instances group under; it defaults to service_name. Use it when several services are one logical agent. The naming model, including what a rename does, is in Naming your agent.
• Every process is one instance: a fresh instance ID per process start, so three replicas of the same agent show as three instances under one name.

The full parameter list is in the SDK reference.

Status semantics

Status is computed server-side from the last heartbeat; the client is never trusted for it.

The difference between stopped and gone is the whole point: stopped means the process said goodbye; gone means it vanished mid-flight (crash, OOM kill, network partition) and would have kept pinging otherwise. Records age out a day after the last ping, so a gone instance stays visible long enough to investigate.

Next steps

• Exploring traces: follow a running instance’s open trace.
• Installation and configuration: every init option, including the heartbeat knobs.