Some features in tlctl would be nice to be able to use in scripts. For example, to gather statistics or periodically abandoning old sessions. Right now the commands in tlctl are made to be human-readable and should not be considered stable enough to be used in scripts.
Table output from tlctl load list may display truncated extensive agent names as the max table width is constrained to 80 characters. Other columns are truncated under the same rules but that is far less likely to happen as numerical columns are typically thin. When long agent names are truncated, there's no way to discern the full agent names from tlctl load list, if for instance sysadmin wants to use them as input to tlctl load show <agent>. A simple no-truncation flag could solve this, but perhaps it's better to include this addition in a script-friendly version of tlctl which would skip truncation altogether, as the problem at hand should be uncommon and the missing information is ultimately available in the web interface.
All printing on stdout and stderr for tlctl replaces any characters that it can't print by '?' (because of e.g. incompatible locale). This is likely not the behaviour we want for our scripts, as it would be more informative to show the unprintable byte sequences to ease trouble shooting.
Making tlctl more script friendly will open up doors for monitoring ThinLinc using Nagios, Grafana et al. We should keep this use-case in mind.
A similar use case is collecting statistics from the ThinLinc cluster. Robert mentioned a few statistics that he deems useful: - How many connected sessions on each agent - Resource consumption per agent - Resource utilization on a per user basis For these, we just need momentary metrics that can be passed on to Prometheus for example. These statistics serve two distinct purposes: 1. Helps planning cluster expansion (how much/what hardware to buy etc.). 2. Gives hard numbers to justify the cost keeping the ThinLinc cluster up and running. I see the above points as a good starting point for a couple of user stories.
I'm not saying that tlctl need to present all of these metrics out of the box. What I'm saying is that tlctl has the potential to be glued together with other tools to make the above statistics trivial to collect.
