Every office has them: the laptops that were closed, travelling or on leave during patch night, still running last month's browser a week later. Heartbeat schedules exist for precisely these machines — instead of deploying at a time, they deploy at the moment the machine appears.
A heartbeat schedule replaces the clock with a status change. PDQ Inventory continuously tracks which computers are online; when a target in a heartbeat schedule flips from offline to online, the deployment fires for that machine — minutes after the lid opens, the dock connects, or the VPN comes up. This page explains the requirements honestly, because heartbeat is a two-product feature, and the patterns that make it behave.
Heartbeat is documented by PDQ as requiring Pro or Enterprise mode in both PDQ Deploy and PDQ Inventory, because Inventory supplies the online/offline heartbeat the trigger listens to. That makes it a feature of the pair, not of Deploy alone — a real consideration when you are deciding what to buy, and a strong argument for running the two consoles together on the same machine, linked, as they are designed to be.
Heartbeat has two relatives for offline machines. The Retry Queue (Enterprise) takes a normal deployment and automatically retries the targets that were offline until they answer. Wake-on-LAN goes the other way — it wakes sleeping desktops before a scheduled deployment, useful for office PCs that sleep at night but never travel. Choose per fleet: desktops that sleep get WoL plus a schedule; laptops that roam get heartbeat; the retry queue mops up whichever jobs still have stragglers.
A deployment that fires the second a laptop opens can surprise its user if the package is heavy. Keep heartbeat packages silent and light where possible; let genuinely disruptive installs (large suites, forced reboots) ride the evening schedule instead, using heartbeat only as their second chance. Also expect a small delay — the machine must be seen online first — so heartbeat is prompt, not instant. Set those expectations and the feature feels like magic instead of interruption.
PDQ's agentless design needs the console to reach the laptop over the network — heartbeat fires when Inventory sees the machine, which means the machine must be on the LAN or connected by VPN. A laptop that works for a month on hotel Wi-Fi without VPN is invisible to heartbeat (and to scans and schedules too). For fleets that live outside the network, PDQ's own cloud product, PDQ Connect, is the architectural answer; within a normal office-and-VPN fleet, heartbeat closes the laptop gap almost completely.
Watch the video's scheduling material first, then set one heartbeat schedule for your laptop collection and watch the stragglers finally converge.
▶️ Watch Full VideoCheck the chain: PDQ Inventory must be running and detecting the machine's status (heartbeat comes from Inventory), both products must be in Pro or Enterprise mode, and the laptop must actually be reachable from the console — on the LAN or VPN. A break in any link silences the trigger without an obvious error.
They solve adjacent problems. The Retry Queue retries a specific deployment to the targets that missed it. A heartbeat schedule is a standing instruction: this package goes to these machines whenever they appear. Fleets with chronic laptop drift usually end up with heartbeat for staples and the retry queue for one-off jobs.
Yes — it fires shortly after the machine comes online, which is usually when work starts. That is why heartbeat packages should install silently and avoid forced reboots. Anything disruptive belongs on a timed schedule, with heartbeat reserved as its catch-up path.