As a frequent deployer of software, I’m usually watching several different flavors of system monitoring all at the same time. A few logstash dashboards in a few browser windows, a few grafana dashboards, a few different logs being tailed in a few different tmux windows.

If it all goes wrong during a deployment – if the error log suddenly explodes – I want to know. Even if I’m looking at another metric, or at IRC, or at my email – I want to know about log explosion immediately.

So I made a thing that plays a little noise whenever a new line is recieved on stdin. I call it Bloop!

And I’ve been using it to tail logs like:

ssh logsever -- tail -f /var/log/important/error.log | bloop -s

So now my stomach drops when I hear, “bloop…bloop…blobloopboopbloop”.

I’m sure this thing has been build a million times because it’s a braindead-simple idea, but I couldn’t find the right words to search for it so I made new one. Now all I need is an EKG monitor so I can see how much this bloop thing makes my heart rate match the overall error rate.