I’m sure you’ve heard of Box Anemometer from the Box (MySQL) team, an excellent UI tool based on pt-query-digest. Now the guys from the box team offer us another killer UI tool based on pt-stalk, and I’m sure you will really appreciate to use it !

What is it ?

 
“RainGauge” consists of three parts :

• A set of scripts that collect data about the health of your system and your databases (based on pt-stalk)
• A process that push these data on a centralised place
• A very simple interface to navigate in the collected data

But the collection begins only when specific conditions are triggered, and you choose what these conditions are. Find below the general flowsheet :

…

Today, I was looking for a quick way to see HTTP response codes of a bunch of urls. Naturally, I turned to the curl command, which I would usually use like this:

curl -IL "URL"

This command would send a HEAD request (-I), follow through all redirects (-L), and display some useful information in the end. Most of the time it's ideal:

curl -IL "http://www.google.com"
 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 03:58:55 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

However, the server I was curling didn't support HEAD requests explicitly. Additionally, I was really only interested in HTTP status codes and not in the rest of the output. This means I would have to change my strategy and issue GET requests, ignoring HTML output completely.

Curl manual to the rescue. A few …