Techniques for prioritized client-server communications based on server health are disclosed. In one embodiment, a system includes multiple clients, and a server communicatively coupled to the multiple clients. The server may include a quality of service (QoS) aware server agent to divide the clients into client groups, assign a priority level to each of the client groups, monitor a health of the server, and determine heartbeat status messages to be sent to the client groups based on the assigned priority level and the health of the server. Each heartbeat message may indicate a state of the server. Further, the QoS aware server agent may send the heartbeat status messages to corresponding ones of the client groups and instruct clients corresponding to one or more of the client groups to send data based on the corresponding heartbeat status messages.