sqshq/sampler

Sampler is a small command line tool that turns the output of shell commands into live visual dashboards inside your terminal. You describe what you want to watch in a YAML file, give Sampler the path to that file, and it runs each command at a chosen interval and renders the results as charts, gauges, or text panels. It is written in Go and packaged for macOS, Linux, and Windows, with experimental support for the latter through console emulators like Cmder. The pitch is that anything you can measure with a shell command can be plotted with Sampler within seconds. Examples in the README include checking database row counts, watching how many in-flight messages a queue holds, timing HTTP requests to search engines, and counting CPU usage with ps and awk. Each item in the config has a sample command and a refresh rate in milliseconds. Several visual components are supported. A runchart draws a multi-line graph over time, a sparkline is a compact single-line trend, a barchart compares several values side by side, a gauge shows progress between a minimum and a maximum, and textbox and asciibox render arbitrary text output, with asciibox using large stylized ASCII art for things like a clock. The project is explicit about what it is and is not. It is not a replacement for full monitoring stacks like Prometheus and Grafana. It is a developer tool you reach for when setting up a full monitoring system would be overkill. There are no servers, no databases, and no deploy step. Sampler can also be installed only on a local machine and pull telemetry from remote servers using an init step that opens an SSH session. Extra features include triggers, which run a follow-up action or play a sound when a metric crosses a threshold, interactive shells for things like database sessions, reusable variables, and configurable color themes. The repository ends with real-world recipe sections for databases, Kafka, Docker, SSH, and JMX.