Monitoring and analyzing watchdog messages in an internet of things network environment

One or more tangible, non-transitory computer-readable mediums having stored thereon executable instructions to provide a health monitoring engine (HME) configured to:

• communicatively couple to an internet of things (IoT) network;
• during a defined training period, train a machine learning (ML) algorithm, comprising observing heartbeat patterns received from a plurality of IoT devices on the IoT network, and using the ML algorithm to construct a reference template based on the observed heartbeat patterns;
• monitor watchdog behavior on the IoT network during an observation period after the defined training period, the watchdog behavior including a plurality of heartbeat messages from a plurality of device nodes;
• identify watchdog behavior on the IoT network varying, beyond a threshold, from the reference template;
• and
• activate a resilience response to protect IoT network health.

A computer-implemented method of providing a health monitoring engine (HME), comprising:

• communicatively coupling to an internet of things (IoT) network;
• during a defined training period, training a machine learning (ML) algorithm, comprising observing a plurality of heartbeat messages received during the defined training period, and operating the ML algorithm to construct a reference template based on the heartbeat messages observed during the defined training period;
• monitoring behavior on the IoT network during an observation period after the defined training period, including observing a plurality of heartbeat messages from a plurality of device nodes during the observation period;
• identifying behavior on the IoT network that does not conform to the reference template;
• and
• activating a resilience response.