1
0 Comments

feedback: I created a tool for me to monitor unreliable backend endpoints, should I make it public?

I'm not sure if this is too niche to ask here, but I'll give it a try.

The problem

I work as a frontend developer. One of my biggest frustrations are issues on the backend. Sometimes:

  • I'm assigned bugs to fix because the data format of an endpoint changed and nobody told me.
  • I think there is some memory leak on the frontend and it's just the endpoint that is randomly slow.
  • I'm starting a demo but someone turned the server off during the night.
  • The frontend is slow, and it's because I got an array with 10K chunky entries.

I tried to find a tool to help with this but I can only do it with a mix of tests and monitoring tools. And almost all are focused only in production endpoints.

How I solved it

So I created a little desktop app that every X minutes checks a bunch of stuff. Example:

APP

This is checking:

  • every 15 minutes, if the endpoint posts is responding
  • every 15 minutes, if the endpoint posts/3 is responding
  • every 2 minutes, if the endpoint posts is returning an array
  • every 15 minutes, if the posts/3 is returning an object with userId 1

And in every request I also know how fast, how much and what type of data it's returning.

With the app, it takes me about 2 minutes to have the checks running.
You can also reload one check or all the checks pressing the refresh buttons.

This is the JSON configuration for my checks:
JSON

I'm using on a windows machine but it also runs on mac. I caught a bunch of issues with this little app.

Make it public?

Do you think it would make sense to make this public?

Thanks!

on May 24, 2021