heartbeat: drop non-functional /start ping, document 20m grace - #49
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The runner-entrypoint pinged <HEALTHCHECKS_URL>/start at container boot, but it never registered on the HC side (0 start pings in 71k) and can't work by design: the runner is ephemeral and the container dies before a run "completes", so a start signal never gets a matching success ping. It only added noise. Alerting relies solely on the plain 60s success ping, which is unaffected. Also update the recommended HC grace from 5m to 20m in the README/.env.example. A tight grace false-alerts on normal ephemeral-runner restart gaps: this check flipped 20x in 50 days on grace=5m (mostly self-recovered blips), which trained the Gotify alert to be ignored right before a real ~18h outage. A generous grace makes a DOWN mean a sustained outage worth paging on.
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Context
Follow-up to #48. While investigating why the ~18h batcave outage (2026-07-10) didn't get acted on despite the Healthchecks.io heartbeat, two heartbeat issues surfaced:
1. The
/startping never workedrunner-entrypoint.shpinged<HEALTHCHECKS_URL>/startat boot, but HC recorded 0 start pings across 71,724 total (last_start: null). It can't work by design — the runner is ephemeral, so the container dies before a run "completes" and a start signal never gets a matching success ping. It only added noise. Dropped it; alerting relies solely on the 60s success ping (unaffected).2.
grace=5mcaused alert fatigueThe check flipped DOWN 20× in 50 days on
grace=5m— almost all brief, self-recovered blips from ephemeral-runner restart gaps (many were the #48 token-race crash-loops). That trained the Gotify alert to be ignored, so the real 17.7h outage looked like just another blip.Bumped the recommended grace to 20m in
README.md+.env.exampleso a DOWN means a sustained outage. (The live batcave check has already been set tograce=1200s.)Changes
runner-entrypoint.sh: remove the/startping + explain whyREADME.md,.env.example: recommendgrace=20m, drop/startreferencesValidation
shellcheck runner-entrypoint.sh✓Deploy
Cosmetic on the host (the
/startline was a no-op), so no urgent redeploy — rides along on the next deliberategithub_runner_refbump.