Vision

hospital makes it easy to setup and use health checks in Python [1].

Made for operations

Once applications or services have been installed and configured, how to figure out if everything goes fine? Is the configuration ok? Is environment missing some component? Operations need feedback. Health checks are part of monitoring and supervision.

hospital provides tools to retrieve on demand feedback about application status.

From smoke tests to scenarios, the goal is to help operations and developers to monitor applications.

By developers

Applications and services are made of software, which is made by developers. Developers are the very first ones who are given the opportunity to run the software. They do need health checks just like they need unit tests or integration tests. Moreover, developers are the ones who know what their software need: environment, configuration... Developers are the ones who can write useful and accurate health checks. Health checks are part of the development process.

hospital is a library that helps developers write health checks.

Focus on what is actually going wrong

How many times have you been searching for a bug when the problem was configuration? How many times have you been searching a problem in configuration when the database server was down for some reason?

A good overview of what is going wrong, including environment and configuration concerns, helps operations and developers focus on the right symptoms.

hospital provides human-readable and robot-parseable output.

Quick checks, full diagnostics

First, operations want to get feedback quickly. If everything is ok, there is no need to trigger deeper checks.

Then, when smoke tests reveal anomalies, operations and developers need more information in order to figure out what is going wrong.

From smoke tests to diagnostic scenarios, hospital helps users to provide the right feedback in any situation.

A general-purpose Python library

hospital is a general-purpose Python library. It means that it does not target specific frameworks. Other projects do, and they can use hospital.

Keep it simple

hospital provides base tools for health checks. As an example, the intention is not to provide a full-featured GUI for users, but rather to provide tools to easily discover health checks, run them, and return parseable output. Other projects can be built upon hospital.

A place to share and promote best practices

python-hospital [2] has been created as a place where developers can converge, meet, discuss, share experience or tools.

hospital is part of python-hospital. It has been created to focus on general-purpose Python features. One of the very first step is to collect such features from several projects that share similar goals. See Alternatives and related projects for details.

References

[1]http://python.org
[2]https://github.com/python-hospital