Zero infrastructure health dashboard

Zero infrastructure health dashboard

How many times you have wished you have a static way of seeing statuses of different services. With the rise of microservices and containers, it is easy to specialize a set of features into a microservice and by weaving these services we achieve expected user experience.

The simplicity of a microservice and containers has an undesired effect on maintenance, maintaining 100’s of microservices and containers is a continuous burden on monitoring teams. With Serverless architecture we can move that inherent burden to the cloud providers, but if we have containers providing service endpoints then we are out of luck. In this example, we have some many rest layers and at a given time if there are multiple environment how do you monitor the state of those services? Monitoring team at organization check and only altered if service is not available for production apps, but how do we pro-actively check the statuses in lower environments?

With that need, I created a zero infrastructure health status reporting app and the main goal of removing the need to have an additional infrastructure. So the idea born out of necessity to use a chrome plugin which helps us with the task. Chrome extensions don’t need additional infrastructure as long as we have chrome browser.

Above is a sample of the extension showing statuses of all applications in each of the environment, status codes are shown as badges with color codes “Green being good, Red being down” clicking on the status code badge shows the output of that particular endpoint.

Some of the features of this extension

• The extension can be configured with the customized configuration provided either in JSON/YAML either from a URL, local computer.
• Endpoints can be configured to refresh at regular interval and providing native chrome notifications when a service is down.
• Configured to show badges for each endpoint, regular use case is to show the current version of code running in that environment.
• An endpoint can be individually refreshed to update the status.
• Option to show/hide badges globally
• Option to provide optional header while getting status.

One of my colleague Joe Freeman graciously provided below video about the extension. thanks Joe.

The extension is available at Chrome Store

Having a need to put up an infrastructure to have this kind of dashboard is one major help and with this, I hope it serves the need of having a dashboard with little to no setup required.