How to Instantly Monitor Socket Health with the Lightweight 'dish' CLI Tool

What is dish?

dish is a lightweight command‑line monitoring service that checks socket (HTTP/TCP) connections, detecting successful establishment, abnormal disconnections, or dead states.

Key Features

Lightweight one‑time monitoring: Simple tool focused on one‑off health checks of HTTP and TCP sockets.

Remote configuration: Load socket lists from a local JSON file or a remote RESTful JSON API.

Fast concurrent testing: Supports concurrent checks with a default timeout of 10 seconds per socket.

Zero dependencies: No external libraries required.

Multiple notification methods:

Upload results to a remote JSON API

Send messages via Telegram

Push to Prometheus Pushgateway

Webhook URL

Cache mechanism: When fetching socket lists from a remote API, dish can cache them locally to avoid repeated requests and continue operating if the API becomes unavailable.

Typical Use Cases

Lightweight health checks: Verify HTTP/TCP socket health.

Distributed monitoring: Deploy independent dish instances on multiple hosts, fetching configuration from a common API for decentralized monitoring.

Periodic checks: Run via cron for scheduled one‑off checks without a long‑running agent.

Installation & Usage

Install with

go install go.vxn.dev/dish/cmd/dish@latest

or via Homebrew.

Provide a socket list via a local JSON file or a remote JSON API endpoint, and configure notifications and options with flags.

Examples

Local JSON file:

<code>dish /opt/dish/sockets.json</code>

Remote JSON API:

<code>dish http://restapi.example.com/dish/sockets/:instance</code>

Notification Configuration

Telegram:

<code>dish -telegramChatID "-123456789" -telegramBotToken "123:AAAbcD_ef" sockets.json</code>

Pushgateway:

<code>dish -target https://pushgw.example.com/ https://api.example.com/dish/sockets</code>

Flags

<code>-cache bool                specifies whether to cache the socket list fetched from the remote API source
-cacheDir string           directory used to cache the socket list (default ".cache")
-cacheTTL uint             cache TTL in minutes (default 10)
-hname string              custom header name for remote API authentication
-hvalue string             custom header value for remote API authentication
-machineNotifySuccess bool specifies whether successful checks with no failures should be reported to machine channels
-name string               dish instance name (default "generic-dish")
-target string             result update path/URL to pushgateway, plaintext/byte output
-telegramBotToken string   Telegram bot private token
-telegramChatID string    Telegram chat/channel ID
-textNotifySuccess bool    whether successful checks should be reported to text channels
-timeout uint              timeout in seconds for http and tcp calls (default 10)
-updateURL string          API endpoint URL for pushing results
-verbose bool              console stdout logging toggle
-webhookURL string         URL of webhook endpoint</code>

Conclusion

dish is a simple, efficient, and flexible monitoring tool suitable for quickly checking socket health, especially in distributed environments and automated monitoring tasks.