Chaos Monkey for PM2 - Naugtur's scribbles

The term Chaos Monkey was coined by Netflix - it’s a tool that kills your production machines at random.

Surprised? Well, that’s how they got developers to think about making the services available no matter what happens. You can’t dismiss any failure as unlikely anymore. There’s a monkey in your server room. Even if it’s entirely virtual.

I needed this concept recently for testing failover of workers running as processes on PM2

Here’s a tiny script I came up with

Minimum Viable Chaos Monkey

Just give it the name of your app as $APP

#!/bin/bash
while true
do
  #choose one of the delays randomly and wait
  shuf -n1 -e 30 60 120 | xargs sleep
  echo "chaos monkey strikes!"
  #choose one random app process and restart it
  pm2 id $APP | egrep -o "[0-9]+" | xargs shuf -n1 -e | xargs pm2 restart
done

Cute, huh?