it seems that pt-kill and pt-heartbeat behave differently in regards to the --stop and --sentinel options.
I can easily put something like this into a cron for pt-heartbeat to restart it regularly:
30 * * * * root /usr/bin/pt-heartbeat --utc --update --interval 1 --host XXX --database percona --table heartbeat --stop --sentinel /tmp/pt-heartbeat-hourly>/dev/null
I couldn't find a comparably convenient way to achieve the same for pt-kill.
Thanks
Alex