Context

Heartbeat events in Debezium are synthetic change events emitted at fixed intervals when no other data changes are detected. They serve multiple operational purposes:

• Confirm that the connector is still connected to the source database

• Detect and recover from liveness failures

Quarkus users should be able to listen specifically for heartbeat events.

Decision

Introduce the possibility to observe certain heartbeat events thanks to Quarkus @Observes

import io.debezium.engine.ChangeEvent;
import jakarta.enterprise.context.ApplicationScoped;  


@ApplicationScoped  
class HeartbeatListener {

    public void heartbeat(@Observes DebeziumHeartbeat event) {  
        /// some logic to apply 
    }  
}

References:

Debezium Design Document: https://github.com/debezium/debezium-design-documents/pull/16