diagw

DiagW is a lightweight, open-source framework and toolchain for diagnosing and visualizing the health of software systems. The term DiagW is an acronym of Diagnostic Widgets, emphasizing its modular approach to composing diagnostic views from small, reusable components. The project targets developers, site reliability engineers, and operators who need quick insight without committing to heavier enterprise monitoring stacks.

History and scope: DiagW emerged in 2022 as a community project on GitHub, motivated by the desire for a simple, extensible diagnostic toolkit. Initial releases focused on local development environments, with later updates extending to remote deployments and cloud-native contexts. It remains a niche tool in relation to larger monitoring platforms.

Design and features: DiagW uses a lightweight plugin architecture. Checks and dashboards are defined via YAML/JSON configuration files. Core features include a small runtime, real-time data ingestion from standard sources, a dashboard renderer, and a minimal alerting integration. It supports data backends such as local logs, HTTP endpoints, and simple metrics formats, and can export dashboards as static HTML or serve them via a built-in web server.

Usage: Typical workflow involves installing diagw, creating a diagw.yaml that describes diagnostic checks and data sources, running diagw to collect metrics, and launching a dashboard to visualize results. It emphasizes easy composition of checks into dashboards and straightforward deployment in containerized environments.

Reception and examples: DiagW has been praised for its simplicity, approachable configuration, and short setup time, but critics note its limited ecosystem and enterprise-grade features. It is commonly used in small teams, proof-of-concept projects, and educational settings to demonstrate diagnostic concepts.