dish
A tiny, remotely configurable monitoring service for lightweight health checks of HTTP, ICMP, and TCP endpoints.
What is dish?
dish is a lightweight, one-shot monitoring service designed for simple and efficient health checks. It allows users to monitor HTTP, ICMP, and TCP endpoints using either local JSON files or remote API configurations, making it ideal for decentralized and cron-driven monitoring setups.
System administrators and DevOps engineers who need a minimal, dependency-free tool for periodic health checks without running a persistent agent. It's also suitable for developers building decentralized monitoring setups where multiple instances pull configuration from a central API.
Developers choose dish over traditional monitoring agents because it's a single binary with zero external dependencies, enabling extremely low resource usage and simple deployment. Its one-shot execution model and support for remote configuration make it uniquely suited for cron jobs and environments where a long-running service is undesirable.
Overview
A simple, remotely configurable monitoring service.
Use Cases
Best For
- Running lightweight health checks from cron jobs without a persistent agent.
- Decentralized monitoring where standalone instances on different hosts pull configuration from a common API.
- Monitoring HTTP, ICMP, and TCP endpoints with minimal resource overhead.
- Setting up alerting via Telegram, Discord, webhooks, or Prometheus Pushgateway for failed checks.
- Caching remote configurations to reduce API calls and allow checks when the source is unavailable.
- Building a simple status page by integrating dish with a remote API for result collection.
Not Ideal For
- Projects requiring real-time, continuous monitoring with live dashboards and instant alerts.
- Environments that need to monitor non-HTTP/TCP/ICMP services, such as UDP ports, database connections, or custom application metrics.
- Teams preferring a graphical user interface for configuration, visualization, and management over JSON files and command-line flags.
- Large-scale, centralized monitoring systems where advanced features like alert escalation, role-based access control, and automated remediation are necessary.
Pros & Cons
Pros
The entire tool is a single executable with no external libraries, ensuring trivial deployment and minimal resource overhead, as emphasized in the README's 'Tiny and Dependency-Free' feature.
Supports notifications via Telegram, Discord, webhooks, remote APIs, and Prometheus Pushgateway, allowing seamless integration into diverse DevOps workflows without vendor lock-in.
Uses parallel testing to rapidly monitor multiple endpoints, reducing overall execution time for cron-driven setups, which is ideal for decentralized monitoring.
Can pull endpoint lists from a remote JSON API and cache them locally, enabling centralized management and allowing checks even when the source is unavailable, as detailed in the caching flags.
Cons
Only monitors HTTP, TCP, and ICMP, with ICMP explicitly unsupported on Windows, making it unsuitable for environments needing UDP, database, or other specialized protocol checks.
Lacks a dashboard or visual interface; all configuration and results are handled via command-line and JSON files, which can be cumbersome for users accustomed to graphical management tools.
Alerting is straightforward but missing advanced features like alert grouping, silencing, or escalation policies, as the project prioritizes simplicity over comprehensive monitoring suites.
ICMP checks are not supported on Windows, a clear limitation admitted in the README, reducing its utility for cross-platform monitoring in mixed environments.
Frequently Asked Questions
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