WS-Management v1.1 [1] Section 10.2.5 defines an extension to WS-Eventing wherein a Subscriber can optionally request that a heartbeat pseudo-event be periodically delivered to the Event Sink. This provides a way to monitor the ability of the Event Source to deliver Notifications to the Event Sink in an end-to-end fashion that is sensitive to problems (e.g. network outages) that are not discoverable via other, protocol-level mechanisms (e.g. wse:GetStatus).

It is the opinion of the WS-Man WG that this feature is sufficiently general as to warrant inclusion in the base specification. The WS-Man WG requests that the WS-RA WG incorporate this extension as an optional feature of WS-Eventing.

[1] http://www.dmtf.org/standards/published_documents/DSP0226_1.1.pdf

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Proposal:

1. Define the heartbeat pseudo-event using both an EventDescriptions document and a Notification WSDL.

2. Add an optional element to the wse:Subscribe element equivalent to wsman:Heartbeats.

3. Add an optional element to the wse:SubscribeResponse element to indicate the heartbeats are enabled.

4. Add a fault that must be generated on the Subscribe request if heartbeats are requested but not supported.

5. Add a parameter to the wse:EventSource assertion to indicate that an endpoint supports heartbeats.

6. Define a mechanism to allow a client to specify whether the request should be performed with or without the use of this feature in a way similar to the way mustUnderstand works.