Blofeld Supporter

A site-reliability companion for your macOS menu bar — watch NServiceBus error queues and Datadog monitors at a glance.

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What is it?

Blofeld Supporter is a tiny macOS app that lives in your menu bar and quietly keeps an eye on your services. It watches your NServiceBus / ServiceControl endpoints and your Datadog monitors, so you spot trouble — messages piling up in an error (dead-letter) queue, or a monitor going red — without keeping a tab open all day.

Click the menu-bar icon and a dark, compact panel drops down showing every endpoint and monitor you track. NServiceBus endpoints show their error counts split into new and already-retried; Datadog monitors show their state, alerting ones first. If something is on fire, you can jump straight to ServicePulse, retry an endpoint's error group, or open a monitor in Datadog — without leaving the panel.

It has no Dock icon and no window clutter — just the icon in your menu bar. More integrations for day-to-day site reliability and DevOps are planned.

Features

NServiceBus / ServiceControl

• At-a-glance error counts per endpoint, grouped by host (e.g. Production, Staging).
• New vs. retried breakdown so you can tell fresh failures from ones already being reprocessed.
• One-click retry of an endpoint's error group, straight from the panel.
• Jump to ServicePulse for any endpoint to dig into the details.
• Single sign-on aware — if your ServiceControl sits behind an OAuth2 proxy, Blofeld opens a sign-in window the first time and remembers your session.

Datadog monitors

• Watch monitors by query — configure one or more Datadog monitor searches (e.g. team:blofeld status:alert); every matching monitor shows in the panel with its state.
• Alerting first — alerting and warning monitors sort to the top; broad queries are capped with a "+N more" line so the panel stays readable.
• Open in Datadog — jump to any monitor in your browser to resolve, mute, or investigate it.
• Powered by the pup CLI (read-only) — your existing Datadog login.

General

• Desktop notifications that fire only when something newly needs attention — an endpoint's error count rises, or a monitor enters alert — no nagging.
• Activity log of recent changes, viewable in the panel.
• Configurable polling interval and launch-at-login.

Requirements

• macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer.
• For NServiceBus: network access to one or more ServiceControl instances (and their matching ServicePulse URLs).
• For Datadog: the pup CLI, installed and authenticated (see Set up Datadog monitors below). Optional — leave it out if you only use NServiceBus.

Install

1. Download the latest Blofeld-x.y.z.dmg from the Releases page.
2. Open the DMG and drag Blofeld Supporter onto the Applications folder.
3. Launch it from Applications (or Spotlight). The icon appears in your menu bar — there is no Dock icon.

The release builds are signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so they open without Gatekeeper warnings. If you build it yourself instead, macOS may ask you to confirm the first launch.

Set up your hosts

The first time you open Blofeld, you'll want to tell it which endpoints to watch.

1. Click the menu-bar icon, then open Settings (the gear).
2. Under Monitored Hosts, click ＋ to add a host and give it a Display name (e.g. Production).
3. Fill in the two URLs:
   • ServiceControl API — e.g. https://servicecontrol.example.com
   • ServicePulse — e.g. https://servicepulse.example.com
4. Under Endpoints, add the endpoint names you want to watch (one per row, matching the names shown in ServicePulse, e.g. order-processor).
5. Repeat for as many hosts as you like.

Your changes show up in the panel immediately — you don't have to wait for the next poll.

If your ServiceControl is protected by single sign-on, Blofeld opens a browser window the first time it needs to authenticate. Sign in once and it reuses the session for subsequent checks.

Set up Datadog monitors

Blofeld reads your Datadog monitors through the pup CLI, so it reuses your existing Datadog login and never needs API keys of its own.

1. Install pup (one-time):

   brew tap datadog-labs/pack
   brew install datadog-labs/pack/pup

2. Sign in to your Datadog site. If your org is on the EU site (or any non-US1 site), set DD_SITE for the login so pup stores credentials for the right site:

   export DD_SITE="datadoghq.eu"   # your site; omit for US1
   pup auth login

3. In Blofeld, open Settings ▸ General ▸ Datadog CLI (pup). It should show Installed & authenticated. Blofeld auto-detects your Datadog site, but if detection picks the wrong one you can set it explicitly with the Datadog site dropdown. (A menu-bar app can't read the DD_SITE from your shell, so Blofeld sets it itself.)
4. Open Settings ▸ Datadog ▸ Monitors and add one or more queries. Each has a friendly name and a monitor search query, for example:
   • team:blofeld status:alert — your team's alerting monitors
   • service:checkout — everything for a service
   • tag:"env:prod" — a tag scope

Every matching monitor appears in the panel (alerting ones first). Click a monitor's arrow to open it in Datadog, where you can resolve or mute it. Blofeld only ever reads monitors (pup is run with --read-only); it never changes them.

Preferences

Open Settings from the panel to adjust:

• Start at login — launch Blofeld automatically when you log in.
• Notifications — get alerted when new errors appear (you may need to allow Blofeld under System Settings ▸ Notifications the first time; there's a Send test notification button to check).
• Check every — how often Blofeld polls each endpoint and Datadog query.
• Datadog CLI (pup) — see whether the pup CLI is installed and authenticated, with a hint to fix it if not.
• Diagnostics — open the log file or reveal the configuration folder in Finder.

Your data & privacy

Blofeld talks only to the ServiceControl/ServicePulse hosts you configure. Everything it stores stays on your Mac, in ~/Library/Application Support/com.danflash.blofeld-supporter/:

• config.json — your hosts, endpoints and preferences (with a one-deep backup that it restores from if the file ever gets corrupted).
• blofeld.log — a local activity log, also shown in the panel's Activity view.

Building from source

Prefer to build it yourself? The app uses Swift Package Manager plus a small bundling script — no Xcode project required:

swift build -c release   # compile
./build-app.sh           # assemble & sign Blofeld.app
open ./Blofeld.app       # launch

For the full developer guide — architecture, the DMG/notarization release pipeline, and testing notes — see CLAUDE.md.