Scheduling -- gaps and bursts

Real telemetry is messy. Networks drop packets, services restart, traffic spikes hit. Gaps and bursts let you inject those irregularities into your synthetic data so you can test how your pipeline and alerts behave under imperfect conditions.

Gaps

Drop all events for a window within a recurring cycle. Useful for simulating network partitions or scrape failures:

sonda metrics --name net_bytes --rate 2 --duration 20s \
  --gap-every 10s --gap-for 3s

This emits at 2/s, but goes silent for 3 seconds out of every 10-second cycle.

Bursts

Temporarily multiply the emission rate. Useful for load spikes or log storms:

sonda metrics --name req_rate --rate 10 --duration 20s \
  --burst-every 10s --burst-for 2s --burst-multiplier 5

This emits at 10/s normally, but spikes to 50/s for 2 seconds every 10-second cycle.

YAML works the same way:

sonda metrics --scenario examples/burst-metrics.yaml --duration 20s

examples/burst-metrics.yaml

version: 2

defaults:
  rate: 100
  duration: 60s
  encoder:
    type: prometheus_text
  sink:
    type: stdout
  labels:
    host: web-01
    zone: us-east-1

scenarios:
  - id: cpu_burst
    signal_type: metrics
    name: cpu_burst
    generator:
      type: sine
      amplitude: 20.0
      period_secs: 60
      offset: 50.0
    bursts:
      every: 10s
      for: 2s
      multiplier: 5.0

Real-world patterns

Pattern	Real-world scenario
Gap 3s every 60s	Scrape target restarts
Gap 30s every 5m	Network partition
Burst 5x for 2s every 30s	Traffic spike
Burst 10x for 1s every 10s	Log storm during deploy

Combine with generators

Gaps and bursts work with any generator. A sine wave with periodic gaps creates realistic "flapping service" patterns for alert testing.

Next

Running one scenario at a time is great for exploration. Production systems emit multiple signals simultaneously.

Continue to Multi-scenario runs -->