Infrastructure work has quietly turned into API work. Monitoring agents post JSON, vCenter and Exchange answer with tokens, log lines carry epoch timestamps, and half the vendor documentation you get handed is a cURL example written for a Linux shell you are not using.
These four tools handle the small translation steps that sit between a copied example and something that runs. All of them work in the browser, so a token or a payload from a production system never leaves your machine.
Tools in this category
- JSON Formatter & Validator — format a minified response into something readable, and find the exact position of a syntax error instead of guessing.
- JWT decoder — read the header and claims of a token, including issue and expiry times, without sending it anywhere.
- Unix Timestamp Converter (Epoch to Date) — convert epoch seconds or milliseconds to a readable date and back, in UTC or local time.
- cURL converter — turn a cURL example from vendor documentation into PowerShell or Python you can actually run on Windows.
Where these get used
The most common sequence is all four in a row. A vendor gives you a cURL call, the converter turns it into Invoke-RestMethod, the response comes back as one long line that the JSON formatter makes readable, and the expiry inside the returned token is an epoch integer that the timestamp converter turns into a time you can compare against now.
The JWT decoder is worth a separate mention because of what it is not. It reads a token; it does not verify the signature, and a decoded token proves nothing about authenticity. What it does answer, quickly, is the question you actually have during an outage: has this token expired, and which account and scopes does it carry.
Related guides
- Git and GitHub for System Administrators: A Practical Guide — version control for the scripts these conversions end up inside.
- CI/CD Pipelines: What They Are and Why You Should Care — where API calls and tokens fit into automated delivery.
- Base64 encoding explained: how it works and when to use it — the encoding a JWT is built from, and why decoding one is not the same as trusting it.
Other tool categories
- Encoding tools — Base64 and URL encoding.
- DNS tools — record lookups, propagation, SPF and DMARC.
- Network tools — subnet maths, port checks and connectivity diagnostics.
- Security tools — password generation and hashing.
- System tools — Windows command builders and log analysis.
- PowerShell and PowerCLI tools — vSphere command building and PowerShell guides.