[influxdb] kapacitor-unit: test automation for TICK scripts

[Gonçalo Pestana]

*TL;DR*: I have been working on a project called *kapacitor-unit *(Github
project <https://github.com/gpestana/kapacitor-unit>) to help you
automating tests for TICK scripts. It's still under development but
currently it's being used to test TICK scripts in production. Go head and
try it out, give feedback and contribute. I hope it helps!


So, I've been working on a tool called kapacitor-unit (Github project
<https://github.com/gpestana/kapacitor-unit>). After using the TICK stack
in production and relying a lot on Kapacitor alerts for proactive system
visibility and data processing, we noticed that it becomes quite hard to
(sanely) maintain a lot of TICK scripts. In a system where you need to
often tune alert thresholds and processing tasks or when the data input
changes, it becomes hard and cumbersome to manually check if the TICK
scripts work as expected against real data over time.


So, kapacitor-unit was born! It automates the whole process of checking
whether a set of TICK scripts behaved as supposed. Currently, it basically
checks whether kapacitor tasks with a certain TICK script behaved as
expected (e.g. OK and/or WARNING and/or CRITICAL alerts were triggered)
given some particular data (in form of recording or protocol line). The
plan is to also include checks on HTTPOutputNode data and so on.


It would be great to have your feedback on this. Would kapacitor-unit be
useful for you? Would you like to see any more features or improvements?
Give it a spin and let me know what you think about it!



Gonçalo

https://gpestana.com | @gpestana