Hi Abe, I think these things can co-exist together. It is not "either, or". The output of nodetool can be either human-oriented (as nodetool status is) or machine-oriented for further parsing by whatever tool like jq etc.
Also, nodetool status is probably the most used command of nodetool by far. Operators have been using nodetool status so much and frequently, it is so ingrained into their workflows, that they probably developed new neural pathways over the years doing so, so just throwing on it one switch by what to sort is a no-brainer (pun intended). I also don't see a lot of arguments for administrators to learn / depend on a new tool, learn how to parse the output (it takes some time to learn the very specific domain language jq provides) just to be able to quickly see some basic characteristics of a cluster in a comfortable way. The suggested improvement does not change the format for the output in any way, it does not add any new columns etc. It is purely about re-ordering the rows so I don't see why it would be problematic to introduce at all. In general, I think that yaml / json output for our tooling is nice, but if we think about that, what we do is that we just take what comes from JMX by whatever means and we parse that manually into json / yaml. In other words, why would we not try to support yaml / json output directly from Cassandra so we do not need to parse it anymore and we just visualize? If we transform it to json in nodetool, then nodetool is the only way to get that json. If there is another client which wants JSON, then what? Anyway ... that was not the discussion I wanted to have, we may expand on that later on. Jordan / Chris, sorting by token in case of no vnodes is simple and is / will be supported. On Sat, Dec 14, 2024 at 12:26 AM Abe Ratnofsky <a...@aber.io> wrote: > Looks like we’re moving towards supporting JSON output for nodetool > commands: > > CASSANDRA-12698 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-12698> > (status) > CASSANDRA-19771 <https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-19771> > (gcstats) > > Is it nodetool’s responsibility to provide sort order flags, when tools > like jq exist? > >
