We present a new failure detector implementation. This implementation, a variant of the heartbeat failure detector, is both adaptable and designed for scalability. Its first specificity lies in the fact that it is designed as a shared service among several applications by way of an adaptation layer. This layer adapts the quality of service according to application needs. The second specificity is the hierarchic organization of the detection service: it allows to decrease the number of messages and the processor load. Through an experimentation evaluation, we show that our implementation is adaptable to the environment characteristics and usable with large scale applications.