Smokeping is a self-contained network monitoring app , capable of monitoring using ICMP/Ping, HTTP, DNS -- as well as other signals generated from CLI monitoring tools (e.g. curl, dig, mtr etc). It provides a web-based monitoring UI to chart the probe measurements so no further monitoring apps (like Prometheus) are needed.

Running smokeping on a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero is a fun experiment in lightweight computing . Using Apache Mod FastCGI makes the app usable on the meager hardware.

By the end of the exercise you'll have the smokeping probes running to test network performance and the UX available on your …

Every app has that last inch (or mile) of code that's not covered by tests. Usually it's an interactive cycle of compile-run-inspect on the command line like

You Test

 curl -X POST https://reqbin.com/echo/post/json

👀 You Expect:

{"success":"true"}

Despite having 3-4 testing frameworks for unit tests, e2e, regression etc-- there's always a gap where you find yourself re-playing commands in the terminal to test.

A common case is 🔥firefighting where ad-hoc tests are needed to validate an emergency config change or deployment.

Not only is this a waste of time, it's error prone and reduces the …

Here's a great example of using the aws-cli to speed up your life. Uses jq and aws-cli

  # bash / zsh function
  function opsworks-hosts-prod () {
    aws opsworks describe-instances --stack-id=fffff-fffff-ffff-fff-fffffff | jq '.Instances[].PublicDns' | grep -v null | sed s/\"//g
  }
  # usage
  $ opsworks-hosts-prod
  XXXXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  XXXXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  XXXXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com
  XXXXX.compute-1.amazonaws.com