The Ncurses External Load Balancer
The terminal screen flickers. Your load balancer metrics shift before your eyes. Nothing is hidden, nothing is delayed.
The Ncurses External Load Balancer is a text-based interface for real-time traffic control and monitoring. It uses the Ncurses library to render a high-performance, low-latency dashboard directly in the terminal. Each update is instant, and every metric is in view without a browser or GUI overhead.
This approach strips load balancing down to raw speed and clarity. Configurations, connection counts, and request rates update on-screen as they change. No mouse. No extra layers. Just a direct display from your load balancer to your console.
An Ncurses external load balancer works by attaching to your load balancer’s API or metrics socket and rendering the data in a terminal-friendly interface. You can view backend health, latency graphs, and failover events as they occur. System resources stay low while network insight stays high.
It excels in environments where you need visibility but cannot afford full GUI stacks, such as containerized deployments, headless servers, or remote SSH sessions. With responsive key bindings, you can shift traffic, disable targets, and reroute flows instantly.
Because the load balancer runs externally, you can monitor multiple distributed pools without logging into each machine. Centralized visibility means faster detection of bottlenecks and service degradation. In automated pipelines, this tool can be wired into alerts for a zero-delay incident response.
Deploying an Ncurses external load balancer interface requires three steps: connect it to your data source, map your backend services, and define the refresh interval. From there, the terminal becomes both your operational map and your control panel.
The result is operational awareness without distraction. Every packet trend, every server shift, every spike—on screen, as it happens.
See an Ncurses-inspired external load balancer live in minutes at hoop.dev and take command of your traffic from the terminal.