VARTA

Zero-overhead health protocol for distributed local agents and network clusters.

32-byte heartbeats over Unix Domain Sockets and UDP. No dependencies. No allocations. Built for people who care about their p99s.

varta-watch

$ varta-watch --socket /tmp/varta.sock --udp-port 9000 --key-file /tmp/varta.key

• listening on /tmp/varta.sock & 0.0.0.0:9000 (secure UDP)

• pid 4821 — status: Ok — last beat: 12ms ago

• pid 4821 — status: Ok — last beat: 8ms ago

• pid 4821 — STALL DETECTED — silence: 2104ms

→ running recovery: systemctl restart my-agent

• metrics → http://127.0.0.1:9100/metrics

How it works

1

Connect

Varta::connect() opens a non-blocking Unix Datagram socket (or connect_udp() for networks). One allocation. That's it.
2

Beat

agent.beat(Status::Ok, payload) encodes 32 bytes on the stack and calls send(2). Returns Sent, Dropped, or Failed.
3

Observe

varta-watch polls the socket, tracks per-pid state machines, detects stalls, runs recovery commands, exports Prometheus metrics.

P99 Latency 0 ns sub-microsecond

CPU (50 agents) 0% nearly invisible

Binary Overhead 0 KB minimal footprint

Measured on Apple Silicon · Rust 1.93.1 · varta-bench