Can't this be piggy-backed on syslog collection? If you have centralized syslog and a facility for heartbeats, you could post-process these heartbeats when log

Can't this be piggy-backed on syslog collection? If you have centralized syslog and a facility for heartbeats, you could post-process these heartbeats when log parsing your "heartbeats" log while only using up resources on your parsing machine. Syslog-ng provides tcp logging.